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Interview with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jan 29, 2006 04:27 PM
from the sooo-tasty dept.
from the sooo-tasty dept.
prostoalex writes "Joshua Schachter, a Wall Street programmer by day, and a del.icio.us hacker by night, is interviewed by Guardian. The article also provides a little background story on del.icio.us, how it got started, and how Schachter convinced Stewart Butterfield of Flickr to add tagging to the photo sharing site. Both del.icio.us and Flickr are currently members of the Yahoo! family."
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Interview with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us
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It's sad (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It's sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's sad (Score:5, Funny)
(http://geocities.com/nglimsdale | Last Journal: Monday April 30 2007, @05:08PM)
Re:It's sad (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
Re,di,culo,us (Score:5, Funny)
The future of del.icio.us and flickr at Yahoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashgeo.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 17, @09:03AM)
To start with flickr, it could/will be integrated with Yahoo! Maps (review [slashgeo.org]):
http://maps.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]
Right now, we already have a similar tool, named flickrmap:
http://www.flickrmap.com/ [flickrmap.com]
As for del.icio.us, combine it with, again, Yahoo! Maps, you get something close to social mapping, which you get with Platial:
http://www.platial.com/ [platial.com]
That's only a start. We'll get more. And there's a lot of competition: Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft (and even Amazon with their mapping service [slashgeo.org]) all want a piece of our mindshare. Competition mean, probably, we'll get better consumer-level tools (of course, there's a price tag, but that's another story).
To get back on-topic, my hopes are we'll see more open source flickr and del.icio.us projets. Take a look at Firefox extensions, you'll find del.icio.us wannabes. We're living in an interesting time...
Oh, yeah, my shameless plug... if geospatial technologies is within your interests, which includes mapping in general, take a look at the link in my signature.
open source? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.debatepoint.com/)
I don't think the source code to del.icio.us is open. This is why I use de.lirio.us [lirio.us] instead, which uses Rubric [cpan.org]: "a notes and bookmarks manager with tagging."
-metric
Re:open source? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.debatepoint.com/)
de.liro.us seems to have just folded. alternatively, I just ran across scuttle.org [scuttle.org] which is written in php.
Plus, it appears to support most of the del.icio.us API. [del.icio.us]
-metric
The benefits of tagging... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ilikepuffynipples.com/)
What is the name for these people... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://phydeauxpets.com/)
I've been online since the BBS days, and I've kept up with all of the new changes, ideas (hell, protocols, even), but this "social" stuff seems (to me) to be nothing more than personal narcicism, magnified millions of times over, combined with a desperate, almost pathteic need to connect with other personalities in order to fill a massive void in their own personal lives combined with a total lack of any kind of academic discipline (it seems that more than half of the people who write online are functionally illiterate). Is it just me? Am I the last one alive with his own brain after the Body Snatchers came through?
Anybody have any insight, or even a good suggested name for these people?
Re:What is the name for these people... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://weill.org/ | Last Journal: Saturday October 01 2005, @01:18PM)
As a fellow former BBSer, I find it best not to take the zealots or anti-zealots too seriously. Yes it's annoying to see ten-year-old technologies like RSS pumped up as the Next Big Thing, but I remember when messages were routed by phone lines during Zone Mail Hour.
Managers (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday August 17, @05:34AM)
Ah yes, the days of the BBS. For you younger people who might have heard of the internet bubble, the BBS was sorta what was before. It was an internet where you had to dial in to a website rather then all the websites being together on one big net. Oh it was more complex then that but I don't want to give you nightmares.
One thing however that was the same was that I saw countless articles and tv shows about how companies needed a BBS to stay in business. Just like every company needed a website. Or a fax.
It really isn't that complex, any new tech needs to be sold so marketting comes up with reasons and sales people tell them to managers and managers lap it up. Or something.
This "social" thing ain't new. It just used to be your personal homespace on geocities but that failed so now it is your blog on myspace because that is better.
Just like BBS sorta changed to websites, personal homepages changed to blogs. And just like some people have always shared their bookmarks this site is just a bit like it.
Will it chance things? Well is slashdot a "social" way to share your links to intresting sites?
It just doesn't sell headlines when you tell the truth and go "sorta new site does something that someone else already does but does it slightly better according to some but with half the uptime".
Doesn't fit and people get bored. Better to claim the revolution is here! (Down nintendo fans)
Re:What is the name for these people... (Score:5, Funny)
"p.eop.le"?
Re:What is the name for these people... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.shokk.com/blog/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 02 2003, @10:39PM)
Yes. And you are so cool and unique for it.
Regarding del.icio.us, I get value in seeing what other links Ruby coders are looking into, for one example. Or maybe other people who set up their Harmony 360 remotes. Or other neat uses for an NSLU2. Or maybe hunt down a recipe for dinner tonight.
There's value in communicating with other people - you should try it some time. Not everyone talks to other people to "fill a massive void", but hopefully it makes you at least feel good to be so dismissive of the ones who *do* need to fill a void. Good of you to still live out that old high school popularity contest throughout the rest of your life. Have fun with all that.
Re:What is the name for these people... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.neilgunton.com/)
In any case, I personally don't think "Web 2.0" is anything real or substantial as a concept, it's simply the aggregate result of a few websites finding out "what works", in different areas. Google was finally able to demonstrate that you could actually make really interactive web apps that work across different browsers (I had stayed away from Javascript since the mid-90's because nothing seemed to be consistent across IE, Netscape etc, so this really was news to me when I saw Google maps for the first time).
AJAX is just a relatively small, technological thing. But much bigger than AJAX is, in my opinion, the burgeoning realization of the social internet. So why has it happened only now, when the technology to do blogging, tags etc has really been around from the very beginning? Well, I think the answer is that social trends take their own time, they happen on their own schedule. It's like crowd behavior, when everybody in the audience decides to start clapping or stop at the same time - groups have their own intelligence.
Finally, the reason we are only seeing these things now is because it's purely a matter of chance as to how long it takes to find out what works and what just misses the mark. Del.icio.us worked, blink.com didn't. Subtle difference, tags vs folders, but enough. It took years for people to realize what the Web could really be good for... at the start it was cool enough just to have a web page. That took a few years to get over. Then people started obsessing about cool design, then scripting, then eyeballs, then "push technology", then e-commerce... it's all trial and error. Eventually, by chance, someone makes some software that makes it really easy to post daily notes to a web page, and, well, that really worked. I think it's pretty funny that many times, the thing that turns out to "hit the mark" is the one that, before it was a hit, the "experts" would deride as being simplistic or just wrong. How could you trust the general public to write their own tags? How could you trust just *anybody* to edit a web page? Horrors!
Turns out what people really love to do is network and communicate with other people, also to seek group status by their work. People seek tribes, it's a part of our nature. The Web is just currently figuring out how to express this side of our nature in ways that work. For a long time everybody assumed that hierarchical classification schemes developed by experts in back rooms were the way to organize stuff. So this guy who did del.icio.us, almost by chance, comes up with a flat scheme that is totally user-driven... and it works. Kind of like Wikis work, when before, all of our senses would have screamed "No, it can't work! It's anarchy! Vandals will take over!"... and yet, here we are. Open source... works. Wiki... works. Blogging... works. Tagging... works. The common thread between all of these is the social aspect - people working together, interacting and communicating and improving the group as a whole as a result. Shouldn't be all that surprising really, it's how we got where we are today.
So, what to call "these people"? How about just
Del.icio.us Precursor (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find fascinating is even with 13 million dollars of investment and lots of publicity and technical know how behind it, del.icio.us succeeded and blink.com failed pretty much because of one simple thing, it used tags instead of folders. This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's (The Tipping Point) observation that the difference between being accepted or not can often rest on a very narrow detail.
It can't be understated how much easier it is organizing stuff using tags, the folders within folders practice is useful for some types of data, but it becomes quite unwieldly quickly for things like photos and bookmarks.
Ari Paparo Dot Com : Getting It Right [aripaparo.com]
delicious sux (Score:1)
Come on delicious, get your import working already.
What's so original about tagging? (Score:1, Insightful)
So the delicious guy became popular with it, but I don't think that's because he invented "tagging". Not that it matters, but the hyping tone of the article just annoyed me.
Besides, I am curious if del.icio.us will really be usueful one day. A tag like "funny" isn't going to help much in the long run... Also, there were other bookmark collecting web pages before. The unsovled problem of the whole idea is the privacy issues. But I learn from that example that it might not be worth worrying about that anyway.
Re:What's so original about tagging? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://weill.org/ | Last Journal: Saturday October 01 2005, @01:18PM)
<meta name="keywords" content="rss,web 2.0,opml,javascript,ajax,css"
I hope all the popular search engines like HotBot pick it up soon.
Backflip.com (Score:2)
(http://building-cl1p.blogspot.com/)
What they're all missing (Score:1, Flamebait)
So I wrote my own. Ajaxed. You can re-arrange by dragging folders into folder to your heart's content. You can share some sets with other people, and keep some sets private. You can even make sets editable by other people. I'm working on import/export.
I'm just waiting for someone to offer me $30m for it.
And no, it would NOT survive a slashdot.
Publishing Tags with JSON (Score:1)
(http://www.greg-hill.id.au/)
The real power of delicious is that they allow you to get your tags back in a multitude of ways - HTML, RSS and JSON [crockford.com]. This means you can integrate your tags into your content [netspace.net.au] to create a better browsing experience. (JSON is also the preferred data interchange method for Yahoo. [yahoo.net])
Delicious also allow you to tap into the "hive mind" by using a generic mode [del.icio.us] whereby you can see tags/URLs for all users, not just your own account. Somewhat perversely, Joshua announced that they have stopped supporting this mode with JSON - leaving only RSS [del.icio.us]. In fact, Joshua stated that the /json/tag/* was just an "accident" in the first place!
Anyone got any theories as to why that is? Why publish "socialised content" as (much heavier) RSS feeds but disallow lightweight JSON feeds? Is it to drive users to Yahoo? Or stop third party searches and other add-ons? Maybe it's the more prosaic "we forgot to put it in the specs, now we can't be arsed supporting it 'cause it's someone else's baby now."
For Those who don't "get" delicious (Score:3, Informative)
As an example... the other day one of my users asked me if I knew of a good place to get fonts. She said that a lot of the sites she had gone to had all sorts of pop-ups, and some had even put adware in with the supposedly free fonts.
I had no idea where to tell her to go, so I did what I always do and searched Google. The top few results were rather questionable, and I didn't feel comfortable telling her to got to them.
So I went to delicious, and type the URL for the tag "font", and then selected the most popular sites with that tag: http://del.icio.us/popular/font [del.icio.us]. This gave me a list of sites, some which had over 3,000 other people tag them. I showed her what I was doing to find the sites, and we both felt like if that many other people found the site useful, then it was probably a safe site to check out.
On the same lines, there's a great delicious search engine here: http://collabrank.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/del.icio.us
wow (Score:1)
(http://sublimecms.com/)
Re:Site looks pretty plain to me (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.mjoelkbar.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday April 20 2005, @09:29AM)
yes, you missed something (Score:2, Interesting)
Did you happen to notice that it's read/write, though? That's really the whole point for a lot of folks; it's a way to store interesting links without having to have 1,000 bookmarks in their browswer's menu.
Re:yes, you missed something (Score:4, Informative)
On my personal homepage however, I have, weather, email and bookmarks. Still simple but yet effecient!
But I think del.icio.us isn't just about storing YOUR bookmarks though, so yeah. I really don't know of any other website that does close to or exactly what del.icio.us does, if you know of any I'd like to know about them.
Re:Site looks pretty plain to me (Score:5, Insightful)
The site is incredibly useful--think of it as a searchable collection of human-filtered and categorized web sites. I often use it when search results from Google and other search engines aren't quite giving me what I'm looking for.
Re:Site looks pretty plain to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you tried Opera or Konqueror? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Have you tried Opera or Konqueror? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Site looks pretty plain to me (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://unugunu.blogspot.com/)
Re:Did they ask (Score:4, Interesting)
Since its launch, and especially during the latest six months or so, the site has been growing at a great pace - exponential growth is actually an apt term [alexa.com].
During the past six months they've had a few server switches and almost constant rejiggering, and they're just settling in with a new bunch of servers, partly because of hardware failure. My assessment of the whole deal is that poor programming, actual scalability or design hasn't been the problem as much as growing pains (more users AND abusers like moronic spiders clogging bandwidth and stealing capacity), power outages and hardware just flat out not working. Although I don't rely on their service myself or use it more than, say, once quarterly, they're a competent bunch, and I fully trust that it will all work itself out in the end.
Re:Did they ask (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Friday March 31 2006, @11:17AM)
There's nothing wrong with the URL. It's probably a browser issue; try Firefox, and if that doesn't work try Opera. If politics.slashdot.org works, del.icio.us should work, too.
Firewalls *can* filter by URL. I suppose the device that does it may not *technically* be considered a firewall, but we have filters here (school district) that block a number of strings in the URL (nude, for example), as well as specific URLs (www.ebay.com) AND IP addresses. That way things are blocked such as a Google image search or sites that change hosts and their IPs along with them.