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.

After reading most of del.icio.us’s help pages, a task that takes the average person less time than drinking a cup of coffee, I had the impression that the help page authors struggled with the concept that anyone might not know how to benefit from using del.icio.us in the first place – which made it even more fascinating for me.

Obviously I was entering the den of a mystical society or order that hid its secrets by laying them out in the open.

As an avid reader of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”, I continued my quest, shivering pleasantly. After trying to digest that I was about to build a “collaborative repository of related information”, clearly one of the deeper secrets of the order, and getting rid of the headache that followed my unsuccessful attempt of a semantic analysis of this daring term at the late hour, I found that at least one explorer had left his traces for me to find. His scribbling on the wall read “Yeah but I still do not get it ” – exactly my feelings at that time.

The text advised to “Just try it and experiment a bit” – I was still cautious, though, not daring to break any of the order’s unknown rules, so I did not chance to experiment, as I considered this suggestion might be a rather obvious and coarse trap for any unwary intruders.

Studying one of the next pages, I found a subtle hint for the usefulness of secrets of del.icio.us, hidden among other pointers. Probably the author had placed it there thinking that nobody might recognize its importance among tips like that a title is located at the top of an entry, or that clicking “copy” will – you might guess it if you take a moment to ponder on it – actually do a copy. The hint read “click to see who else saved this site”. So clicking there would allow me to intrude into the most personal secrets of other persons, and spy on them? No wonder that this reference was buried deep among mostly irrelevant information!

I decided to watch my steps with even more care than before, and look over the shoulder from time to time, to see if anyone was already spying on me.

Fearing pursuit, I left del.icio.us, and went to the world’s biggest library, looking up what other scholars might have already found out. One of the order’s counselors had been incautious enough to speak publicly about the obfuscation measures taken painstakingly to prevent explorers from understanding what benefits they could reap, once they became a member of the order. He talked about having seen people who came across del.icio.us “fail, get irritated, and completely give up “. So, the members’ ruse had worked often enough in the past. They obviously underestimated the persistence of real curious common folk, though.

I searched further and found notes written by a sage who seemed to be frivolous enough to entrust his secrets to the order’s pool, hoping to be able to retrieve them later.

Obviously, this sage even hoped to share his secrets with fellow scholars, and even strangers who might chance upon them.

I concluded that he hoped that others would do the same, so that he could, looking into del.icio.us’s pool, interweave his own secrets with those of strangers. I suppose that he was haunted by the selfish thought that thereby he would be able to find new insights, which are known to sometimes emerge when different trains of thought meet.

Having uncovered enough secrets for one night, I decided to sleep and discuss my findings with my fellow workers the next day, knowing well that they were likely to find other leads that I might have overlooked.