ON DEL.ICIO.US AND HARD TO REMEMBER BRAND URLS

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

As regular readers know, despite my view that tagging is still hard, I remain intrigued by the technology and regularly use the user-side "bookmarking" capabilities of tagging services, in particular Del.icio.us (called Delicious for the rest of this post).

Despite it's maddening interface, and relative lack of any hand-holding HELP files on how best use the service, I'm drawn to the service several times a week almost as a personal challenge.  It seems to be pretty popular...and long-time users seem to be doing some cool things with it...so I remained determined to become a Delicious Zen Master.

But I still falter almost every time I want to use it because I can't remember how to spell  it's internet address.  I have it bookmarked on all my machines, but I often use external computers.  Almost every time, I have to get the URL by typing "Delicious" into Google, thus getting this page, and then going to the site.

I may be in the minority here, in that I'm getting old and can't remember something as clever as Del.icio.us. 

At a far younger age, I could spell the name forwards and backwards of one of my favorite arch-enemies of Superman, Mr. Myxzptlk (via Wikipedia), so Su.oici.led ordinarily should be a piece of cake.

But it does bring up the question, how do regular, mainstream users not motivated by general geekiness go to the site? 

Simply typing in www.delicious.com gets you to this page on GoDaddy.com, where the person who apparently registered the domain back in 1995, has parked it for now.

The whole thing came up due to this tongue-in-cheek post by SweatyBlog, talking about this trend using .US addresses by other companies.  In this case it's Supr.c.ilio.us, which seems to be a work in progress of some sort.  SweatyBlog expresses his view on this .US trend as follows:

"All I know is this naming convention .us is getting ri.dic.ulo.us."

Funny Blog-Bite...and let's not forget Script.aculo.us, which provides javascript libraries for websites. 

The whole thing is understandable in a way, because it's a clever way to launch a new brand on the internet, and clever, short domain names are getting harder and harder to come by.

But it does pose the question of giving mainstream users an easier way to keep coming back.

Although I do like Delicious, I have two current pet peeves.

The first pet peeve has to do with the Delicious interface comes AFTER one gets registered.  The site presents you a page, asking the user to add not one, but THREE bookmarks to the all important, "precious real-estate" bookmark link bar on all browsers.  I mean even Google and Yahoo! get only one bookmark each on my link bar. 

That's OK, if one is determined to master the service, I went ahead and give them three spots. 

But other than giving the briefest of explanations on what the first bookmark does (and nothing on how it can be optimally used), there's no explanation on what the other two will do for the user, nor pointers to how power-users use them to best effect.

There probably is an explanation for these bookmarks somewhere, but I haven't been able to find them to date.  I'm sure they're working on improving the user interface and help files.

The second pet peeve is that Delicious ONLY offers one level of privacy for your tags/bookmarks:  NONE.  All Delicious tags are publicly accessible by everyone, which I KNOW is one the key benefits of tags.  But it takes away the ability to store your private tags across multiple computers on a web-based storage service.

In contrast, Furl seems to offer both a private and public option, so you can have your cake and eat it too...i.e., use a web based tagging service to store all your private bookmarks, AND use the service for public tags and bookmarks that take advantage of the network effects of public sharing.

It's great to have choices, and both services have their benefits.  And they both have relatively cool names to boot.

Comments

[Scott]

Good thoughts Michael. Like you, I'm doing my best to harness the awesome power of "tagging". As a result, I've acquired a slight distate for typing ma.ny p.eri.od.s in.to w.or.ds t.hat don.t ev.e.r ha.ve .an.y p.unc.t.ua.ti.on in th.em. Well, you get my point. It's hard to remember. But hey, those folks with the clever .us extensions have done their job well, I'm talking about their brand.

[Otis Gospodnetic]

Michael: funny you say that about delicious' domain name. I can remember how to type it, but I agree it's a pain. I run Simpy, a service that let's you actually _find_ your links once you tag and save them. You may want to have a look. It's also a lot easier to spell and remember and, if I can judge by various feedback emails, people love its UI, compared to delicious'.

[Gil]

Hope you will give Delicious some more chances.
To answer your peeves -
1st one on bookmarks should find them useful. One is to your delicious home. Another to post the current web page to your delicious list. Last is to check if a url is bookmarked by any delicious user.
2nd peeve on privacy should be noted as handled as an anonymous user if you choose it to be that way.