Incredible as it may seem I’ve been totally unaware of del.icio.us until today.
Actually that’s not entirely true, I’ve been aware of it as I’ve seen it mentioned in several places but I never took the time to see just what it was and so I’ve never groked it until this afternoon when Melo showed it to me in all it’s glory.
I am mighty suspicious of everything that describes itself as “social something-or-other” and that’s probably the reason I’ve never felt the urge to look into it more seriously. People were talking about this new “social link software” and it drove me off but now that someone actually showed me what it does and how useful it may be I like it.
The concept of managing URLs in a browser-independent way is appealing to be sure but being tied to an external site with only HTTP access to it made me shy away from previous attempts at link- or bookmark-gathering sites.
In comes del.icio.us with it’s wonderful API, open to users since the beginning (or so I’m told) and which is even more wonderfully and conveniently wrapped in the Net-Delicious perl module distribution.
I may have found my link management solution.
The beauty of it derives almost entirely from it’s API, since it allows me to seamlessly integrate my links in my site and make the fact that I am using del.icio.us to manage them totally transparent.
If I ever want to change the way I’m doing it all I have to do is implement the link support some other way (or support it in some other service with an equivalent API) and the visitors to my site won’t be able to tell the difference.
What I gain out of using del.icio.us is something that resembles what I would like to have for bookmark management a whole lot better than any browser I know does (I just click on the “Post to Delicious” bookmarklet instead of clicking on the “Bookmark” button), a better search engine for my links/bookmarks, the tagging system for correlation of links and the added bonus of the information on link popularity (amusing if not all that important).
Just to get a taste of it I’ve added some links to my account and created a very small script that gathers my latest links hourly and displays them on my main page,
Things are looking good.