22 comments skip to comment form

1. 

   Mert TOL said— 1 hour later

   Hey Brian. Maybe you’re right for some people but unfortunately I’m not agree with you. Delicious is not just a element of gain some traffics. For instance, I’m not using my Firefox’s or Safari’s bookmark, using Delicious for this. Maybe some people promoting their Delicious accounts because taking more traffic. I mean, this is not all about trying to shown on front page and earn some traffic. This is about usability and -in other window- accessibility to specific publishers.

   In my opinion, people should create some characteristic instruments for their social bookmarks. And Delicious should be one of them. Cheers my friend

   #1
2. 

   Brian Cray said— 1 hour later

   @Mert TOL: I agree that the game doesn’t change much for readers. But for publishers, Delicious no longer provides the same promotional benefits.

   #2
3. 

   RBKartorks said— 1 hour later

   Thanks for posting this Graham, I’ve been getting ready to use Delicious for my own publishing to generate traffic. As a person who hasn’t actively begun using it yet, this is very useful to know how much effort I should really dedicate to it in relation to Twitter.

   #3
4. 

   Brad said— 2 hours later

   Brian,

   Awesome point. It seems really silly of delicious to marginalize the importance of actually using delicious, and bowing to twitter. If they keep this up they are going to have some stiff competition with all of the twitter aggregators out there… maybe namely TweetMeme.

   Best,

   Brad

   #4
5. 

   Brian Cray said— 2 hours later

   Brad, that’s exactly what somebody on Hacker News just said! http://tr.im/wxPf

   #5
6. 

   Peter Cooper said— 2 hours later

   Right on. From what I can tell Joshua Schachter (original founder, now long gone) feels similarly about the way Delicious is going now. I wish it’d stick to what it’s good at and not jump on the social bandwagon.

   #6
7. 

   Scott Rubin said— 2 hours later

   Delicious isn’t for publishers. It’s for users. You see, there are two kinds of bookmarks in the world.

   The first kind of bookmark is the kind you use your browser for. The sites you visit every single day, but you don’t want to type in the URL every day. It’s basically just keyboard/mouse shortcuts for URLs.

   The second kind of bookmarks is the kind provided by delicious. You find an site, or an article, and you want to remember it for later. Maybe you want to read it later. Maybe you want to share it with someone. Maybe it has useful info, and you want to be able to find it easily in the future without Googling for it.

   So who cares if you can’t drive traffic to your site? Delicious is for me to remember this article to show all my friends how some selfish person on the net only cares about their traffic. It’s a tool that *gasp* actually helps users and not anyone else. OMG.

   #7
8. 

   Brian Cray said— 2 hours later

   @Scott: Any publishing platform has two user segments: Readers and publishers. No publishing platform can survive without both.

   As publishers we are responsible for generating traffic. As publishers, we use Delicious as a traffic generation channel. As readers we may use it otherwise, but this article is written for publishers from a publisher’s perspective.

   #8
9. 

   Derek Martin said— 2 hours later

   You are both right and wrong.
   1) delicious’ purpose has always to help users remember and share links.
   2) delicious is not “for” publishers.

   That being said, it does seem that delicious is going through a mid-life crisis.
   It is asking itself “Why am I here? What is the reason? What is my purpose?”

   People only tweet what they want to share, not what they want to remember.
   Up until now, sharing was only half the delicious equation.
   By including tweets, they have switched to sharing as the main focus.
   Is del.icio.us repositioning itself from “social bookmarking” to simple “link sharing” ?

   If that’s the case, how does it add any value when compared to sites like Digg?

   #9
10. 

    Brian Cray said— 2 hours later

    @Derek: If no publishers promoted delicious, noone would know about delicious. Same with Digg, Reddit, etc.

    Delicious needs publishers as part of their inbound marketing strategy. The most popular bookmarking or voting services will continue to be those promoted by publishers.

    #10
11. 

    RBKartworks said— 3 hours later

    I am a freelancer with my own graphic design business. I’ve got a blog, twitter account, and use a few other sites for resources but nothing religiously. I had considered using Delicious because it not only provided good resources and bookmarking, but that it also came highly recommended by top designers and publishers I follow for generating additional traffic to my site. My time is limited and precious, so any service that gives two hits for one goes high on my radar.

    That’s why this post was of great interest to me. I think it’s odd that a rather popular service such as this seems to have made a rather large marketing error. They’ve ignored a very loyal segment of their audience. Not only that they seem to have taken away a very valuable and important piece of their ROI tracking. Everyone wants s return of some kind on their time. For viewers/users it’s the ability to keep important links and references, for publishers it’s the ranking and validation of traffic generation.

    Since my time is short and I need both. I’ll look into it further, but it appears to me that Delicious doesn’t quite have the appeal it did.

    #11
12. 

    Stephen Van Doren said— 3 hours later

    You know, maybe it’s just me, but I use Delicious for sharing my bookmarks across multiple computers that I have to encounter on each and every day. Interesting links, fascinating articles, sales–all sorts of things that I may find at work during my lunch break and want to follow-up later on when I’m back home.

    I use Twitter to share interesting links with friends, and to have short conversations about things that are interesting now in my life.

    You know what I’ve probably only seen once or twice (and those times purely by accident)? The front page of Delicious.

    #12
13. 

    Brian Cray said— 3 hours later

    @Stephen: Many people may not be looking at the front page of delicious, but the front page links are syndicated EVERYWHERE. That’s what makes the front page powerful.

    #13
14. 

    Mert TOL said— 3 hours later

    Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source.

    Young designers made Delicious like Digg or something. In the beginning of Delicious, I remember, people were using Delicious just for -like Scott says- easy access without your own computer and remember your fav. pages or articles later.

    And, Delicious is not for the “publishers”. Delicious is for the users. And, Users=Publishers in Delicious.

    Actually, people shouldn’t send their own article to Delicious. And, shouldn’t promote that. This is unnatural. If you are using Delicious for remembering your own article, why you’re using. Use Digg or something like that.

    #14
15. 

    RBKartworks said— 3 hours later

    Thanks Mert TOL for the clarification on it’s other uses. I only use the one computer for now, and I bookmark it all on my browser. I thought adding another site to my list would take up more time, but knowing the benefits I’ll keep the suggestion in mind.

    #15
16. 

    Derek Martin said— 4 hours later

    @BrianCray Delicious doesn’t need publishers. In fact, I think its front page would be more valuable to users if publishers had nothing to do with it. Publishers taint the value of pages because they have a vested interest in their pages being ranked higher, regardless of what users think. The whole point of social activities online is to help users find TRUE VALUE in the sea of meaninglessness that is the internet. When the people who own the content are involved in promoting it, that is advertising, not advocacy. The Social Web is about advocacy. It’s about my friends, or people like me, saying that something is cool. That’s what gets me to look at it.

    #16
17. 

    Brian Cray said— 4 hours later

    @Derek: The social web is about advocacy, you’re right. I have never argued that delicious does not support a user group with their own needs: people who simply want to bookmark.

    But I’m certain you’ll find a direct correlation between the amount of publishers that promote a sharing platform and the amount of people using that sharing platform. It’s important that bookmarking services are recognized and promoted by publishers. Otherwise the people who simply want to use these services will never know about them.

    If every publisher replaced their “save to delicious” button with a “save to faves.com” button, you’d see a MAJOR shift of users in a few months time.

    #17
18. 

    Khayyam said— 1 day later

    There have been points on all sides and the one thing I did not find anywhere within the posts is this: your peers.

    Depending on what field you’re in, you can connect to your peers/users with delicious. I can visually see what my friends and colleagues are looking at. There is nothing like that anywhere on the web that keeps me informed of what I want as specifically as delicious does.

    Sure it’s a bookmarking site, but it’s not a cult where people basically run “payoffs” to other users in whatever form to “help” promote content.

    Let delicious be… it does just fine. No cults, no spamming, no burying of good content. Just a place where you can see what everyone is organically bookmarking.

    Personally, I think it’s the one and only source of true content anymore. The rest are gamed and abused. So I think it’s the perfect application just as it is. As far as the twitter integration… well I integrated mine long ago and most of my tweets are from delicious as opposed to Digg, Mixx or Reddit.

    My two cents and I very well could be wrong… but it’s the way I use it and it feels oh so good

    Great post and start of discussion Brian!

    You bad ass

    #18
19. 

    wil reynolds said— 2 days later

    I think the biggest thing Yahoo has not done well with delicious is using it as an indicator of quality as it relates to ranking web sites / pages. Who cares about re-working the page to work with twitter, how about using some human factors like delicious tags from long standing established users of the service to influence a little bit the search rankings, it could help them compete in a way that google can’t. However, with google reader they are starting to get some of this human interaction data that someday may influence rankings.

    #19
20. 

    bencurnett said— 2 days later

    It seems that the delicious (or any social bookmarking/crowdsourced) front page provides most of its value to a publisher in the same way a billboard does- millions of eyeballs on your ad.

    But the web provides the unique opportunity of a super-focused vertical for targeting your stuff. We can go for just the eyeballs that we think our ad provides value for. No more shouting (or billboards). Your ads only get shared if they’re worth it (or your content is worth it) to the sharer’s circle of influence. Permission marketing, put a more famous way.

    So doesn’t this just help your content get a better demographic? Won’t these be people who are worth it to you as a publisher to focus on?

    #20
21. 

    Kristopher Hooper said— 3 days later

    Generally speaking, no one cares much who bookmarked the link in question as this is nothing more than meta information. At that, it is likely of lesser importance than the tags used to organize the link into folksonomies.

    This is no accident; Delicious’ ability to recognize patterns with bookmarks in aggregate while keeping focus closely on the content of the page in question is, in large measure, what’s made Delicious successful and innovative. (They’ve added the network features for the exceptions where a user does care to follow another user’s links. The design they arrived at for this feature works well precisely because it treats these cases as the exceptions they are). Think of Delicious as Google, but powered by human reviewers instead of — and treated as dispassionately as — automated bots and you’re seeing the service more accurately for what it is.

    Accordingly, if you are seeking acclaim for finding great stuff (a reasonable pursuit), Delicious probably isn’t the tool for the task: you’ve done your part by bookmarking the page for the larger good.

    You might more effectively achieve your goal by featuring the links on your blog with accompanying commentary (something you likely already do). If your commentary is popular/timely/interesting/etc. it might be featured on the “fresh” or “popular” pages on Delicious as it will be seen as valued content. This will bring it to the attention of more people.

    As far as I can tell, that’s how it works.

    #21
22. 

    billoc44 said— 1 week later

    For the record… I am not a Delicious fan or user, nor am I a detractor. I am trying to learn everything I can about Web 2.0 because I think in some way this may be big in my career in the future. I also enjoy where this is all going.
    Having said that…
    If the only thing on the internet was “peer gibberish”, people talking to their friends no matter how interesting they think it is, and or TWEETS.
    I would throw my computer out of the window.
    Hence, if there were no real publishers of content…
    If there were no professionals in their respective fields, big or small on the interenet providing content = publishing content = publisher.
    There would be little reason for me to be on the internet.
    The internet didn’t become great because of Twitter, lest we rewrite history, it was decidedly the other way around.
    I am not ashamed to say that I have gotten amazing technical information off of You Tube. It is actually my point, just because someone publishes content on the internet using the same forum that became an internet phenom because of “Kids Gone Wild & Stupid” videos, doesn’t make that content and/or that publisher any less of a professional and certainly any less valuable to me.
    Publishers please keep publishing, I could give a rats about Delicious.com and or their bookmarking service.

    #22
23. 

    Respond to this post—

    Your name

    E-mail address will not be published