1. Regarding del.icio.us speed, I haven't seen any noticable slowdown... it's not lightening fast but isn't any slower than it used to be. From a page, it's about 2 and a half seconds from when I click my Firefox "del.icio.us this" toolbar bookmark until the form comes up, and the auto-fill tags seem fast.

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Aaron Hockley

2. Hi, Barb,

This is a great set of suggestions: you've given me a lot to think about.

I'm not finding del.icio.us at all slow; in fact, for the last week or so it's seemed pretty fast (Firefox, using the mozdev del.icio.us extension). I do agree, though, that finding things in del.icio.us isn't easy and I, too, opt for Google/etc first. Ian Davis summed it up well here: http://internetalchemy.org/2005/08/searching-folksonomies.

Ian Davis' post also caught my eye for this suggestion: 'In the same way that Google desktop inserts results from my hard disk into any Google web search, I want all the pages I’ve bookmarked to be searched and shown first whenever I search in Google. Maybe I could do this as an extension to Google desktop, but a better solution would be for Google to allow me to register my RSS feeds with them. Then, they could subscribe to my feeds to learn what I’ve recently read or bookmarked and show those at the top of any search results. That would be extremely cool and infinitely useful!'

I liked your idea of a sidebar where we could 'jot some new notes about (a link) ... go find another link, rinse, repeat. At the end of that, I’ll have a new blog post'. This touches on another thing I've come to realise over the last few months: the poverty of current blogging tools. Of course, I'm a PC user (blush), so your take may be different from mine. (Even Ecto for Windows disappoints: see, http://nosheep.net/story/ecto-for-windows-blows/.)

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by David Smith

3. Nice feature list. I haven't noticed any slowdown with del.icio.us and I use it frequently. I do find value in locating resource using my tags rather than going to Google because there's too much noise in many of the Google searches that I do for specific topics (versus general information fishing).

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Steve Bate

4. Barb - nice set of feature ideas, thanks!

I run Simpy (http://www.simpy.com/). Simpy will help you with some of the things you are looking for and can't find in del.icio.us:

- batch operations on tags (splitting, merging, removing, renaming)

- full-text search and search refinment. Simpy crawls and indexes the _full_content_ of your bookmarks, thus creating a "mini Google" of your and other people's public bookmarks. You can use all Boolean operators, +, -, phrases, just like with Google. You can also boost search terms or tags during search, you can use fuzzy queries, and so on.

This is the KEY for finding a link quickly in your pile of bookmarks accumulated over the many months and years of surfing. As I said on Simpy's blog, search is the King (Kong) in the world of folksonomy applications and services, just like it is in the Web-wide context:
http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/2005/08/11/Categories_vs_Keywords_vs_Labels_vs_Tags.html

Oh, and you can import your del.icio.us links, so you can get started quickly.

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Otis Gospodnetic

5. "What would really compel me to hang out in my social bookmark collection is if I could actually work, remix, and prepare content right from within the interface itself."

Right on the money. The key to breakthroughs in information handling will be interfaces that allow fluid switching between search, browse, and _use_ of information, rather than the crude "now I'm searching" -> "now I'm authoring" paradigm dominant today.

"In the same way that Google desktop inserts results from my hard disk into any Google web search, I want all the pages I've bookmarked to be searched and shown first whenever I search in Google."

If you are a My Web 2.0 user, pages you've bookmarked (and which your friends have bookmarked) are full-text searched and shown first whenever you search at Yahoo.

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Ryan Shaw

6. Sure wish folks from Furl.net were hanging out in threads like this and participating. They have such a lead in the field, I believe, but who knows how long that'll last if they keep standing still.

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Marshall Kirkpatrick

7. My big issue with Furl is that my list of saved links *links back to them* and doesn't just link to the friggin' original link. So when I'm looking at my list of Furl'd items and I click on a link, *it doesn't take me there*, which is what you'd expect (and how the others work) -- it takes me to a Furl detail page, and from *there* I can actually get my link out.

Same thing with the "email this link" feature, which I would find extremely useful for doing research because you can take a category of links and email them all in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, it's useless because the list of links you get in the email all take you back inside Furl instead of taking you to the link destination. I understand the net effect drives more traffic to the Furl site, which is good for them, but it's absolutely horrible for me, and a huge waste of time. I've emailed them about this and got no response. So I've switched to Spurl. ;) (in conjunction with My Web 2.0 and del.icio.us, though My Web 2.0 is right now kicking del.icio.us's ass. My Web 2.0 is now my "master" collection, and I use Spurl to store ad hoc and temporary links I need to investigate further)

Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by barb dybwad