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del.icio.us & Browser Integration

Wednesday / 03 November 04

For a couple of weeks now, I have been fascinated by del.icio.us and have been trying to mold this into a permanent online bookmarks replacement.

A small introduction for people who don’t know what on earth I am talking about:

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

Since Mozilla Firefox is my primary browser, I was delighted to see the following the extensions delicious.mozdev.org and Foxylicious. The former integrates the viewing part of the del.icio.us service, whereas the latter integrates your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser. Unfortunately, both extensions don’t allow del.icio.us to be a permanent replacement.

Foxylicious imports and orders your bookmarks by the tags given when posting the respective bookmark. This means that a bookmark with multiple tags, is imported multiple times. Obviously, this creates redundant data. Tag based ordering is a very efficient method for searching through a collection. However, it is a very inefficient method for bookmarks that are used frequently.

For del.icio.us to become a permanent replacement of my offline bookmarks, the service and the extensions require some changes. Understanding del.icio.us is a social bookmark manager and both the service and extensions are in beta, I do hope some improvements will be implemented.

• The ability to add private bookmarks only visible to the posting user
• The ability to create categories of tags
• The ability to order frequent bookmarks and tag based bookmarks seperately

If time permits, I might look into solving the browser/extension side of the problems. Perhaps someone else has managed to solve my problems instead? One way or another, I am looking forward to see the future of this service, as well as the integration of del.icio.us into the web.

Posted in Browsers, Technology | 1 Comment