about del.icio.us

This is from: Joho the Blog: [berkman] Joshua's news.
If you aren't using del.icio.us yet - I really encourage you to check it out.

Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us is giving a lunchtime talk. His presence has sold out the small conference room at the Berkman Center so we've moved to a bigger room.

What follows are paraphrases of what he said; I am certain not only to have omitted much but to have gotten stuff wrong, so before you get pissed at Joshua for saying x, you might want to check that he in fact didn't say y and I said he said x.

He built delicious in 2003 to manage his own links. He had been using a text file, but twenty entries into it he had already introduced a tag into it.

Currently at delicious: 5M links, about 10M posts, on average about two tags per item. About 500,000 unique tags. Growth in tags is slow.

The Chinese firewall blocks delicious now.

Hard core tech pages have gone from 25% to 17% over the course of this year. "So interests are starting to broaden."

Q: How would you describe delicious to a layperson?

A: It's a way to remember stuff. Links initially but we're adding some new types.

Q: Delicious is aggressively without a user interface, so I think of it as a pipe instead of as a consumer destination...

A: I've finally hired people who have a different sense of user design than I do. We've done a round of UI testing — the one-way mirror, etc. That was an entirely terrifying day. Once they figured out the point and got through the URL, people like the interface. It does what it does without a lot of jokey stuff, etc.

The API: People do get value out of it, but it's also a political statement that it's your data. Plus I'm lazy.

Q: What's the financial model?

A: The same as any other advertising-backed discovery engine, like Google. The people who are using it are paying us with information. Ten times the number of people are on the site but not signed in than those who are signed in.

Q (me): Which are you going to push, the individual or social uses?

A: You won't use it if it's not useful to you. But we'll put in more social structure. Group tags are coming — tags that are lightly permissioned. You'd tag it as for a group, e.g., "groupname: tag." (Example: nptech, a tag used by people in the non-profit tech field.) In the case of people collectively organizing around a tag, I think you want to amplify that. We're trying to put in privacy now; it's a little bit of a challenge to do and keep it fast.

I worry about systems that stay in stealth mode. There's stuff you're not learning. We generally push code out to the live site 2-3/week.

Q: Say more about group tags and privacy...

A: Items can be private. If it's tagged for you or your group you'll be able to see them. The items won't be visible (in order to avoid problems with totalitarian governments.)

There are 8 people at Joshua's company now.

Q: Why "tags" instead of "keywords" in coming up with the terminology?

A: It was inadvertently clever. I wish I could say I did it intentionally. Typically, when keywords are used, you don't see a list of the aggregated keywords. Maybe it is a slightly new thing.

Q: (me) Will we see typed tags, e.g., for events you get a field for time and a field for place?

A: I would like to store more rich datat types but that won't happen immediately, e.g. contacts and events. You can make a date tag now: "date._____" There's stuff about the url, stuff about the post, stuff that belongs to you. E.g., if you bookmark an Amazon url. I could go get the bookcover, the price, etc. Then how do you represent them. We have to figure out how to do that once we've got performance up.

Q: As delicious scales, certain tags become meaningless. E.g., the "china" feed is pretty useless. But if I could specify subsets or groups...

A: You'd create a group and let people in. It will be implemented as a tag, so you could get a feed of (say) "berkman" and "china." (With your inbox you can map tags, i.e., this person's "china" is that person's "asia.") We have something called "the nework" coming; I originally called it "friends" but that was somewhat creepy. You identify people as being in your network and get feeds from them. [A group will be an established set of people who opt in. A network is a set of people you designate; they will not know they're a member of your network. I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he's been added as a contact "I want to rip my face off."]

I'm not trying to build up the delicious community. There are plenty of communities.

Almost no one subscribes to a person/tag. Most subscribe either to a person or a tag. So, if you bookmark something and someone else has notes (nee "extended") on that thing, you'll be able to see them in your inbox. ("Inbox" is badly named, Joshua says.)

About a third of people who create accounts never come back.