del.icio.us has just launced a new feature: Network Badges. It allows users to advertise their del.icio.us links, with optional details as to how many “fans” they have. Fans are people who have added you to their network so that they will see the links you post. The badge also features a link to let people add you to their network.
This is a great feature in terms of publicizing del.icio.us activity, but I worry that it’ll make del.icio.us even more like a social network. But I guess that Pandora’s box has already been opened. Tom Carden has commented that he already considers del.icio.us a form of miniblogging, something which becomes evident when you notice he’ll even post rhetorical questions in his link descriptions. (His feed is a great source of code-related goodness, by the way..)
Right now my del.icio.us/garuda account has 24 “fans”. So whenever I post a link on del.icio.us I’m painfully aware that it will be seen by more than 20 people. Hence I have to edit what I post. Some bookmarks are private or not intended for public viewing. And no, I don’t mean porn, serial crack sites or your favorite Bittorrent portals. A while back I bookmarked some Google Maps links to relevant personal addresses, then deleted them when I realized that it would be a bad idea to have those visible to just anyone. And sometimes I want to bookmark a link that I’m going to blog, but I know that if I do so there is a good chance that another blogger will see it and beat me to it.
Of course, all links on del.icio.us have always been public, but previously they were hard to browse through and so you had a certain “security-through-obscurity”. Now every link you post will be seen by everyone who have added you to their network. This is fine by me, I’ve already used my del.icio.us account as a data source for the Generator.x blog. But I would like to avoid having to find a separate bookmarking service for my less public links.
The solution is simple: Private bookmarks. A simple checkbox would allow you to save some bookmarks as being private. Or even better, maybe they could use Flickr-style privacy, so that you could make some links private, some visible to friends-only and everything else public. It should be easy to implement.
And if the aim really is to make del.icio.us more like a social network, it would be great to have a way of commenting on links. I’ve already seen people use the link descriptions as mini-blog entries, and also wanted to respond to things they’ve written there. So comments might be useful, although I’m not sure exactly how they should be implemented.
I also have an account with StumbleUpon, which treats links more as a kind of mini-journal, allowing you to post more complex descriptions including images. It also allows readers to comment on your posts. Just a shame that StumbleUpon’s use of tags is badly broken to the point of being useless, and that some of their ideas are not well resolved. Still, now that del.icio.us is moving more in the direction of an explicit social network, I think they might need more of the features that StumbleUpon has.
PS. You too can be a fan of my del.icio.us links. Don’t be shy.
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great idea. so good in fact, the site already has that exact functionality.
when saving a post, note in the upper right hand corner of the tagging field a space where you can mark “do not share.” what’s really cool is that when combined with the new network capabaility, you can actually mark private bookmarks to be visible by only select members of your network through an auto generated tag marked for:[username] that shows up in the suggested tags section.
above comment was supposed to start with the following excerpt from your post:
“The solution is simple: Private bookmarks. A simple checkbox would allow you to save some bookmarks as being private.”
As the previous poster already mentioned, private posting on del.icio.us is already available. See a screenshot at http://www.flickr.com/photos/myhd/206479800/
Thank you for the feedback, I finally found the feature, buried deep under “Settings > Experimental > Private saving”. Hardly very easy to find.
I love del.icio.us, but right now it’s useful first and foremost as a database, best accessed through feeds. Regular browsing feels to awkward. The network idea is good because it allows you to follow what friends and colleagues, with feeds makingn that even easier. I think del.icio.us needs a general UI overhaul if it is to successfully support more complex features like privacy, networks etc. As it stands it is too time-consuming to browse and edit.