10 years to solve the browser bookmark problem?
Did it seriously take 10+ years to find a decent way to use browser bookmarks? Del.icio.us has taken off in a huge way. Bookmarks were never useful to me and I always ended up abandoning them. Many techy folk have multiple computers they use and a bookmark on one machine is useless when you’re using a different machine. A central way of synchronizing them was needed. I do admit I had at one time considered making an online repository but it didn’t seem efficient enough. And I even forget that I’ve bookmarked things. Just last week I looked at my bookmarks, only to realize I had a bunch in there from a long time ago. Forgotten and unused. Get Foxylicious to add and update your del.icio.us bookmarks into your Firefox bookmarks.
If del.icio.us was just a place to dump your bookmarks, it probably wouldn’t be doing anywhere as well as it is. The social aspect of it is what has given it the buzz. Being able to see what other people are reading and bookmarking drives huge interest. I know when I bookmark something, I’m interested to see how many other people have bookmarked the same thing. And if so, what are those people reading? What have they bookmarked that I might like? A great addition to the service to be to see if you have multiple common bookmarks shared with other people. If you have a few common bookmarks with a person, there’s a good possibility you have common interests and each of our bookmarks would be useful to each other.
This is the same for tagging in Flickr. What will be the next big application to apply tagging? Is tagging and folksonomies the next killer app? Or maybe tagging is required to have a killer app? Google’s Gmail has been planning tagging for quite a while now. I think tagging would be a great addition for anything social. For example, online dating. I luckily don’t have any experience in online dating, but instead of writing a description of yourself and what you’re looking for, using a tagging system would be a more efficient system to find common interests. The dating service would then have a higher level of success when suggesting dating matches. Other ideas: HR, job searches.
The only lesson I can learn from this is to pay more attention when I have a problem with the way things are (or in this case - aren’t) working. Software to solve existing problems is the best to make - you just have to pay attention to what needs fixing.