A del.icio.us way to search

A simple idea turned into a great web application, that's what I like about del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is an online bookmark repository. Instead of adding your favourite urls to the browser's bookmark, you can post them to Del.icio.us and access them from any computers on the web. Simple concept, but that's not all. You can also search what other people bookmark and see how popular those bookmarks are.

Again, the power of virtual community is used here to leverage the usefulness of the site. The more people use Del.icio.us to post their bookmarks, the bigger the bookmark repository, and more useful search result can be returned. I believe Del.icio.us is waiting for that critical mass moment to happens, before they can truly reap the profit of running this service.

Alas, Del.icio.us' infrastructure doesn't seem to cope well with the site growth. In the past few weeks, the site was down several times due to power failures in their colocation servers. These issues should be taken care seriously before people giving up and turning to alternative sites.

Infrastructure issue aside, it is a great experience to use Del.icio.us on my daily surfing activity. I use the site to:

• Manage my bookmarks. I surf at work and home, so having a single bookmark repository is really helpful. Assigning tags also helps me to categorize the bookmarks based on the keyword, which I find is easier to remember than file system-like structure in the classic bookmark system.
• Share my technical bookmarks to my colleagues more easily. Just point them to my Del.icio.us url. No need to cut and paste the link in the email or IM. However, privacy is a big concern here because they can also get my personal bookmarks
• Do search on the internet. See what other people bookmarking! Think Del.icio.us as an alternative to Google search.
• Learn about the web interface... simple but powerful. More about this in the next post.

Other that privacy issue, my other concern is if some people start to misuse the system by posting urls for advertising rather than their actual bookmarks. More and more people post the same url, the more popular the bookmark is. This will taint the usefulness of the site as an alternative way to search the Internet.