The Quest for Understanding del.icio.us

During some idle time in the office the other day, I talked to my colleagues about Web 2.0 tools and technologies. Some of us have syndicated blogs and use Flickr, so RSS and other easy stuff were pretty much understood by us. Then the talk came to del.icio.us and we all drew a blank. Most of us had taken a look at the site and all had seen it mentioned at some place or other, but none had any idea what the point was about sharing your links online. We use link services like Sync2It or linkaGoGo which allow us to synchronize, access and share our bookmarks across computers, operating systems and browsers, so what good was it to store the bookmarks more or less unorganized in some server system, instead? When I went home that night, I decided to to pursue The Quest for Understanding del.icio.us.