They Used To Call It Social Bookmarking

I discovered del.icio.us in a moment when I was almost getting crazy. My computer had some problems and I had to format it every month or so. Invariably, I was forgetting to save my Firefox bookmarks, and each and every time I was thinking how good it would have been to have a place where bookmarks are stored to stay.

Then I found del.icio.us. That was my first encounter with social media. Of course I immediately skipped the word “social”, and I was fascinated by the bookmarking stuff: finally, I was able to keep all sites I wanted to visit again in one place, where they won’t go away every time I format my computer.

Probably that was the initial idea behind del.icio.us, but because of the fight for traffic and search engines recognition, for many people it quickly turned into something else: a way of getting links to a web page. Of course I also spotted this opportunity, so my bookmarks became more and more my own sites, instead of those which I wanted to revisit.

What I still don’t get, is why they call these bookmarking services social. I can never find my own submissions, so it is very hard for me to figure out how those sites which end up on the front page were actually discovered and bookmarked by all those people. I can bet they don’t discover them on del.icio.us.

Anyway, I stopped trying to gather del.icio.us bookmarks for my posts. I’m just happy to use it for the link I get by bookmarking my own stuff.

I’d like to hear from you, if you know a better use of del.icio.us. If you want to have your say, you are invited to join our social media group project about del.icio.us and other social networking and bookmarking services.

This article is my submission to the del.icio.us part of the group project.