Is there a world beyond delicious?

February 28th, 2006

Is there a world beyond delicious?

There is an enormous diversity in the landscape of social bookmark managers. Nonetheless most of the bloggers tend to stick to del.icio.us.
I rarely hear bloggers writing about another service than delicious. With this post I present two alternatives (RawSugar and Simpy) and want to prove that a spreading of users to alternative services could improve the world of tagging in general.

Locked in?

I recently tried out Simpy and RawSugar and thought about switching to one of them.
It is true that you are not really locked in to del.icio.us. You can export all of your bookmarks by just typing
curl --user username:password -o backup/delicous_backup.xml -O 'http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all'
But in a way you just feel like you’re locked in, isn’t it?
Why so?

del.icio.us has the most folk using it, it feels good to be with the masses (the mass can’t be wrong, can it?)
there’s more feedback while tagging
could I switch back to delicious when this other service turns out not to meet my needs? Well, I would have to find out…
heck, I think I am addicted to del.icio.us. Sure I could change but will my life go on? Will my “last bookmark list” still work? And ah, I’ve got references to del.icio.us at 13 points of my blog and then I would have to tell my friends that I switched and then my to:mybestfriend wouldn’t work any more and.. ah, why should I?

Well, guess what? You are locked in! :-)
I think the point is that the advantages and disadvantages of the bookmark services aren’t known. I haven’t read much about it, have you?
I recently switched to RawSugar, after using del.icio.us for about 1 year. I have a little bit of experience using Simpy while using it for a little project. I will therefore confine myself to describe just this three services, if you have experiences with other services I would appreciate your comment.

del.icio.us

Let’s start with the one you’re most probably using.
Advantages:

Clean, simple user interface
Most data, therefore
- best popular page
- you see how popular an url is while tagging
- much feedback from other users while tagging

Disadvantages:

slow roll out of new features
bad performance
spam
I guess my dad couldn’t use it

Joshua and his team are trying hard to limit del.icio.us to what it should do: Saving bookmarks and finding them:

“delicious is a tool, not a community. One reason i donut want it to be a community. some community behaviors are not good.” the “you suck” effect, and flame wars [Joshua Schachter at Carson Summit]

In fact del.icio.us has got the cleanest ui of all bookmark managers I’ve seen. On the other hand, I can’t imagine my dad using it. The whole terminology and the design are not the type of web page my dad would use. But then again this is an advantage. The fact that del.icio.us doesn’t want to please all users makes it simple for the ones it is made for.
The other disadvantages heavily depend on each other: When Joshua started his service he most probably took a few mysql tables and optimized his queries, when the demand started to grow he’s put in some cache here and there but then the big wave hit: in the last half year, the number of bookmark posts per day tripled. I guess he now is working on improving the performance rather than rolling out new features, as

“tags doesn’t map to sql at all. so use partial indexing.”[Joshua Schachter at Carson Summit]

The succeeding bookmarking service programmers already knew the problems of tagging applications before they started, Joshua and his team have to improve a running service. And then they switched to Yahoo’s location, that probably also helps slowing down the roll out of new features. The “private bookmark feature” is planned for about a year already, yet it is still to be released.

RawSugar

RawSugar is a bookmarking service run by a small company with a handful of programmers. It became beta in September of 2005.
Advantages

Hierarchic tags
multi-word tags separated by comma
fast service
fast roll out of new features
private bookmarks

Disadvantages:

not that much data
different terminology than what you’re probably used to

The fact that RawSugar started their service after the success of del.icio.us helped them to design their engine for big amount of data. They definitively have a good engine, As they never put public information about their engine, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to speak about details here, but they don’t just have a 3-table-mysql-schema :-) In fact I believe their engine would handle a wave of new users without stopping roll out of new features.

They have got hierarchic tags, and this is a very clever idea. First I wasn’t totally convinced about this feature but it has itself proved to be very helpful. I don’t like del.icio.us’ tag bundles. Tag bundles may be a good thing if you have 100 to 200 tags, but if you have 500 or 1000 tags (I currently have over 2000), it isn’t manageable any more. With RawSugar you can put a hierarchy in your tags while tagging an item. if you type “article>rant” you say that “rant” is a child tag to “article”. If you later tag a site with “rant”, the tag “article” will automatically be added.

A word about their terminology: At first it was difficult to map between the “delicious terms” and “rawsugar terms”. Sure, tags are still tags but somehow I was (too much) used to the whole terminology of delicious and took it as granted. On the other hand it’s good to see new viewpoints and that’s why I think new players in the tag market are a good thing. RawSugar aims to be not only a service for bloggers and geeks. Their UI looks more “traditional” like the one of Amazon, for instance: After you have searched your bookmarks after a certain tag you see a search field where you can type in another name of a tag and then hit “refine”. I think this is more “natural” than clicking the “+” signs at del.icio.us.

Finally they have a bunch of features:

Nice integration to your blog (tag your articles and then simply add their automatic generated navigation to your blog)
you can switch users while tagging (means: you can have different “directories”: one for your blog, one for your company, etc..)
they are playing with automated clustering techniques (similar tags and clusters), I’m looking forward into the integration of this algorithms!

Simpy

Simpy is a one man project of Otis Gospodnetic. As he is/was a developer of Lucene he has a good knowledge of database systems and scaling. He has got a good engine too so I guess his service would still stand after a big wave of new users. Simpy seems to be online since early 2004 (according to the date of Otis’ earliest links).
Advantages:

group tagging
search results can be sorted by date, popularity or relevance
it’s possible to search by site (i.e. www.nytimes.com) and/or extension (i.e. mp3) and/or combined with tags
multi-word tags separated by comma
not commercial (free time project)
private bookmarks

Disadvantages:

one man project, therefore not many resources to put in
UI is a bit cluttered

What I particularly like about Simpy is it’s spirit: Otis is “one of us” giving away his spare time for this service and demanding nothing in return. In return, on Simpy’s developer mailing list he gets a lot of feedback from people that want to contribute, that is: write little applications, that use Simpy’s API. I am in contact with Otis: he is always very friendly and open for feedback. That said, he knows that his UI lacks some polish :-)
I’d say the killer-feature of Simpy is group tagging. While tagging you can click the checkbox of one of the groups you’re in. There’s an RSS-Feed of each group so this is a very useful feature. Ever tried to do that with del.icio.us? You have to log out and log in into the group account..

Bottom line

There are many many more bookmark manager services that I never actually used (I probably have signed up to about 50% to them just to get my favorite username in case they turn to get “teh r0×0r”), there’s a good list at listible.

In the end, there’s no real winner. And I like it that way. I suppose in long term each bookmark service will have it’s community.
The popular page on del.icio.us is ruled by entries about design and web2.0. I guess other services will attract other communities.
That said, I envisage two things:

a service that asks you about your hobbies and topics of interest or let’s you submit a attention.xml file and then tells you which service fits best for your needs.
an “interchange format” that helps you switch from one bookmark service to another, ore more generally: more collaboration between the bookmark manager services. Update: Faber of smarking just started a project to design a interchange format based on microformats, he’s set up a mailing list. Great effort!

Well, I highly encourage you to look beyond your own nose because there’s a big world beyond delicious. :-)

Then each went to his own home

Philipp Keller's thoughts on tags and other sweets