The concept is simply that in addition of storing bookmarks in our browsers on our individual computers, people can put them up at del.icio.us for anyone to see. People can access their own bookmarks from any computer anywhere, and can browse through others’ lists of bookmarks too, but even that is a superficial description of what the site enables. By putting up your bookmarks and “tagging” or categorizing them, you can instantly see bookmarks that other users have put up and assigned the same tags to. Essentially, this lets you see how popular your bookmarks are with other users, and lets everyone find websites that serve up topics of interest to them which they might not have come across otherwise.

Del.icio.us is as much as website as a web application, designed entirely around its users. The site itself has almost no content of its own to offer, instead depending on web users to supply bookmarks for others to find.

Getting Started with del.icio.us

The signup process is quick and painless. After registering you’ll see a page specific to the web browser you’re using which has an illustrative screenshot and instructions for adding two bookmarklets - links that let you quickly access the site’s features.

The first time you log in, you’ll see a blank white page with a few confusingly named links on the top and to the right. It isn’t immediately apparent what you’re supposed to do, but once you click around and start exploring, you’ll begin to grasp the concept.

The first thing to do of course is start adding bookmarks! You can do this manually by clicking the link marked “post” on top of the screen, but there’s an easier way as well. Remember the bookmarklets you added to your browser toolbar? Whenever you’re visiting a page you’d like to add to your collection, just click the one called ‘post to del.icio.us’ and a new page will pop up that allows you to add that site instantly. No matter which method you chose, you’ll be prompted to type a brief description of that site and an extended one if you like. It is also possible to import bookmarks from Internet Explorer , FireFox and other browsers. (This option was temporarily disabled at the time of writing this review.)

The last part though is the most important – adding tags. This is essentially what the whole site is about; its heart and soul. Tags allow you to organize and categorize the links you’ve bookmarked, and unlike having a traditional folder-based hierarchy, you can assign as many as you like to each bookmark. The tags allow people to search each others’ lists of bookmarks and interact with them, but we’ll get to that part later. Once you add bookmarks, you’ll see them filling up the empty white space, and the tags you defined for your links will be listed on the right of the screen. Most of the confusing options you saw before will start to make sense, and once you’ve got in excess of ten or twenty tags, you’ll be able to experiment with them and see what they do.

Tags!

Tagging helps avoid ending up with a huge list of bookmarks in which it’s impossible to find what you’re looking for, or a rigid system of folders which is a huge hassle to keep organized. Tags are incredibly powerful, and most importantly, they’re user defined. That means actual humans get to decide which pages will show up in a search result for a specific word or term, so search results on del.icio.us are potentially more relevant than those on Google.

Dig a little deeper into del.icio.us and you’ll discover how to manipulate tags, by sorting them into “bundles”, similar to folders but again allowing a tag to fall within multiple bundles. A “cloud” is a visual representation of the number of bookmarks with any given tag. Clouds group the names of all your tags together, with the more popular ones showing up larger and more prominent than less popular ones.

Further to that, each user’s page of bookmarks has a search field you can use to narrow down the list of tags, or combine tags to show only results that match both criteria. Type “http://del.icio.us/username” in your browser’s address bar to go straight to any user’s bookmarks, or “http://del.icio.us/username/tagname” to display only the bookmarks with that tag.

Each user also has an Inbox, which allows them to monitor users and tags. Specify a tag and you’ll be able to see all the new bookmarks added to it by any user. Tell it to track a user, and you’ll have a record of that person’s tagging habits, which allows you to not only find new websites, but actually see how other people discover them!

Doing More

Almost every single page on del.icio.us can be turned into an RSS feed for you to browse through at your own convenience using an RSS reader. You can subscribe to a feed for any tag, any combination of tags, the list of all popular tags that you see on the homepage, a user, or even your own inbox. RSS feeds also let people find files such as MP3s or PDFs that people have bookmarked, and what’s more you can even add RSS feeds for audio podcasts directly into iTunes!

Del.icio.us can automatically post a list of bookmarks to your blog, depending on what service you use, making it that much easier for you to share your favourite websites with others. And there are now literally hundreds of tools available through third party websites that let you do stuff like check out thumbnails and statistics of some of the most popular bookmarks or integrate search results with other popular websites.

Delicious is the most popular bookmarking tool around, but very little effort has been put into the Usability of the site. Even though the features are explained in the “help” section, chances are that even tech savvy users might have difficulty in using Del.icio.us initially.

Delicious does not support import from other online bookmarking sites making that a major drawback nor does it provide any functionality to Export bookmarks. There is no option of making a bookmark, private. All the bookmarks added by a person can be accessed easily. These act as deterrents and make it slightly difficult for users to move over to Delicious.

Yahoo! now owns Del.icio.us so we can hope for new features in Del.icio.us, but until then the other option of finding a better well balanced online bookmarking tool can be explored.