Don’t blame yourself, blame the tool. Nobody tags consistently (except for the hyper-excessively anal), so a “better” del.icio.us would make that irrelevent. Said another way, never blame the user; blame the user interaction designer for having a less than optimal user interaction design.

Anyway, I was just using del.icio.us for exactly the type of reason Jon starts out his post discussing, i.e. tagging some URLs so I could send a list of items to a friend, and I identified six *more* things I think del.icio.us should do:

1.) I want a thumbnail of the website so I can view a list of my URLs and hopefully remember the site where the URL came from.

2.) I want an expandable/collapsible view for each URL where the URL’s page is displayed in an iframe below the URL. I want to be able to expand & collapse them individually as well as be able to expand & collapse all at once.

3.) I want to be able to rate each one in the context of a tag. i.e. if I have articles tagged with “AJAX” I’d like to be able to rate 1 to 5 for the tag “AJAX”, even if I tagged the URL with something else, like “REST” (IOW, maybe I’d want to say it is a “5″ for REST but only a “3″ for “AJAX”)

4.) I’d like to be able to define the order in which they are listed on a by-tag basis, and also if there are sticky ones (i.e. “always show these two first, then the rest in reverse chronological order or the rest by descending rating, etc.)

5.) When I tag a URL I’d like del.icio.us to do a little comparision to other tagged URLs on the system with the same base URL and ask if I should tag what might be the canonical URL instead (i.e. if I try to tag a URL that has a marketing tracking code it would be nice for del.icio.us to notice that the base URL is the same and that frankly the content for the one with tracking code and the one without are essentially the same as well and have del.icio.us ask me which one I want similar to how Digg works on news item submission.)

6.) And lastly I’d like as a site owner to be able to ask del.icio.us to re-evaluate my URLs for 301 redirects on a site, a path, and/or a invididual URL basis. For this not to cause heartburn for users, they would need to add two options when tagging: “Update URL is URL changes” vs. “Never update URL” and “Delete URL if site goes offline for 30+ days” vs. “Never delete URL.”

Anyway, add these 6 capabilities with the prior 6 I quotes and I think del.icio.us’ usage would skyrocket.

Belated HNY and best for ‘08 John; got behind the curve these past weeks.

Laterally related, a new study [1] shows (ironically?) that folk who create formal teachings resources are themselves usually self-taught and usually engage in more informal teaching/learning processes. Which for me a) shows why I’m out of sync with them historically, since my theory is in-formed by the actualities of my experience and practice, and b) makes me wonder if they’re only (only?!) responding to market forces in what they’re producing.

cheers
–bentrem

[1] http://informl.com/2007/12/18/the-cobblers-children/

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls:

Should have been:

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls

As someone who cares a lot about URLs and how they can be used I agree that del.icio.us has much latent value. The problem is they haven’t created the killer interface for it yet. What will that killer interface be? I don’t know yet, but I’ll know it when I see it.

But seriously, the problem I find with del.icio.us is several fold:

1.) del.icio.us’ search is just too damn slow.

Whenever I consider wanting to search del.icio.us, I have this subconscious aversion and experience an overwelming feeling of mental fatigue. Make it as fast as a Google search and this problem will go away.

2.) del.icio.us doesn’t do any stemming or help deal with mispellings and/or synonyms.

Sometimes I tag things with singular and sometimes plural, but they really are part of the same set. It takes a very structured mind with lots of discipline to be 100% consistent, and I unfortunately don’t have either of those attributes. Sometimes I use different words that mean the same, and certainly that happens across multiple people. Although the URLs are different, del.icio.us could offer acknowledgement of potentially related tags.

3.) del.icio.us hides its tag management tools.

Okay, “hide” might be too strong but del.icio.us could really make it a lot easier and more obvious how to go about merging, pruning, and otherwise managing tags. It could make suggestions, and/or at least off the tools in the context of tag/search results listings.

4.) del.icio.us’ UI doesn’t offer drill-down of categories making it much, much less useful.

For example, let’s say I tag something with “urls rewriting advocacy” and let’s assume that I’ve tagged lots and lots of articles with “urls rewriting” and lots of others with “urls advocacy.” Actually, you don’t have to assume because I have.

Now if I go and search “urls” on del.icio.us from my favorites:

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls:

del.icio.us will show me that I have 55 tagged with “urls+advocacy” and 38 tagged with “urls+rewriting” (along with a bunch of others that are also tagged with “urls.”)
However, if I click the links for either “advocacy” or “rewriting” I don’t get the following, which would be useful and is what I would expect:

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls+advocacy
http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls+rewriting

Instead, del.icio.us in a braindead manner (IMO) forgets “urls” and takes me to just those terms:

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/advocacy
http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/rewriting

Now, it is possible for me to go and add that “+” in the URL, but I have to know to do it because it’s not in the UI (or a least it’s so non-obvious even I haven’t found it.) FYI, even this works:

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls+rewriting+advocacy

But it would be so much better if del.icio.us would make this obvious and give me links to drill down and also to include in breadcrumbs.

Also, if they do this it would make a lot more sense for del.icio.us to use slashes instead of pluses, for hopefully obvious reasons:

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls/rewriting/advocacy
http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/rewriting/urls/advocacy
http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/rewriting/advocacy/urls
http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/advocacy/rewriting/urls
http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/advocacy/urls/rewriting

5.) del.icio.us doesn’t give any standard way to use scoped tag words without resorting to some really ugly and ultimately unworkable conventions (actually, this is a problem with user tagging in general.)

For example, with respect to my use of “rewriting” and “advocacy” above, both really are scoped to “urls” but del.icio.us looks for all things tagged “advocacy” which just seems a little off to me, and even so it doesn’t give any drill downs for what things tagged with advocacy have also been tagged with:

http://del.icio.us/tag/advocacy

That said, I’m not sure how I would craft tags and URLs for scoping. Maybe they could use dashes, i.e. “url-advocacy” and “url-rewriting”, which is what I’ve tried in the past, but without built-in recognition of that from del.icio.us, it really becomes unworkable.

6.) del.icio.us has simply stagnated.

Most of (all?) of what del.icio.us offers it has offered for years. It seems like that once Yahoo purchased it they moved on to other things and let it just do it’s thing. Maybe Joshua Schachter had better things to do, but my guess was that it became part of the smaller borg that is Yahoo, and in the confusion has been left to rot by default.

=======

All that said, it wasn’t until Firefox incorporated del.icio.us as the default bookmark store that I ever really used del.icio.us even though I knew of it. Now I actually have the del.icio.us toolbar in IE7, which is the browser I use by default. I tag things constantly, but almost never go to del.icio.us to see my tags, or the aforementioned reasons.

Want to see del.icio.us usage take off? Get Microsoft IE8 to use use del.icio.us for its default bookmark store (or use some Microsoft Live version of the same), and the average people’s usage will skyrocket. Address these issues in which one that IE8 supports and I’ll bet you’ll see it become mainstream.

BTW, given where you work I’ll bet you could at least gain an audience with the IE product manager to discuss this concept, if nothing else… ‘-)

Best regards,
Carsten.