Del.icio.us, a well-known link bookmarking site is growing with its popularity because of its simple yet extremely powerful features. It is relaunched by new owners Avos, former founders of YouTube.
Key Points
del.icio.us can smartly achieve your favoured content across the internet for easy future reference. As links come from collective intelligence, the posts are mostly updated, reviewed for accuracy and filtered from all the aspects.
Instead of searching good information from the scrap and wasting time, del.icio.us readily collects top notch articles relevant to a subject.
With recent relaunch of del.icio.us there are many cool features introduced. A new web interface is updated with social sharing, commenting and image oriented. A new curation feature called ‘stacks’ is great using which user can contribute to something called as “playlists for the web”.
A “Stack” is nothing but a bunch of links and images about the same topic.
Stacks, single click link saving, two-word tags with blank space, tage separation by commas, my inbox with links, profile pictures (avatars), featured stacks and links on a home page are some of the new additions to the latest interface.
Missing features – individual tag cloud, twitter integration, subscribing to tags, searching bookmarks in ‘your network’, bookmark count per tag, floating around the web news, blog widgets with bookmark count, popular bookmarks are no more available.
Its simply previous “Saving links” vs new “Sharing links” thing.
Previously delicious was a favourite tool for web professionals for design resources and saving work but the team is pushing its reach to more general topics such as politics, travel and entertainments and trying for heavier web traffic.
Users can subscribe to your stack and follow it. It is like collecting quality blog resources through links about a certain topic. So in short you have to create a link stack about a topic which can further go viral through people’s bookmarks and tags.
Delicious currently shows people who follow you, not those who you follow, so technically you can share your stacks with few only. Wisely a social spread is limited through incoming interests only.
Considering 10 links per stack is highly advised for now, but a steady upward social reach is limited as competition is rising high all the time. Perhaps link sharing is a hot topic right now and del.icio.us is taking is very seriously.
With below tips, you can use del.idio.us at its full potential.
Delicious Inbox – is a great option to see new sites. New entries will be often added for you to visit and add in your library.
del.icio.us Firefox Extension – Now easily bookmark your favourite sites and work to your account. Save pages and tag the articles accordingly for your next reference.
Desktop shortcut – Instead of every time launching it from a web browser, you can directly connect to your del.icio.us account with one desktop click.
Newsmasher – This Greasemonkey script will tell you what people are saying about your liked page. These small tags are placed on the top left corner of your browser.
Below are some hot links for power users –
keyword
keyword+keyword
organization+GTD
organization+GTD+office+tools
rss/popular/TAGNAME
rss/popular/GTD
Bookmark from Google Reader
A cool Greasemonkey script will add a nice button to your Google Reader posts. From there you can easily save your favoured pages to your delicious account.
Smart Bundle Tags option – If you have mass links stored on your delicious account, combining them as per category will save a lot of your time.
Go to Settings > bundle tags >
Other than this tips, you can always display your links on your personal websites for your readers. For this, you can use Linkrolls and Tagrolls.
Alternatively, you can smartly tag your links so that you can easily find them at any time in future. e.g. any tech related article can be tagged as “@tech”
Interesting Official Tools from del.icio.us
Tagometer Badge – Help you easily display tags and number of saves on site.
Delicious API – Create your own tools with delicious.
Jason Feeds – You can load your own javascript object that will have your bookmarks.
Del.icio.us Url – Enter any URL to see its history on delicious.
If you are looking for third party developer tools for delicious, here is a great article “absolutely delicious complete tools collection” which includes amazing tools such as post checker, browse your bookmarks visually, using safari to bookmarks, edit your bookmarks in one hit, edit and manage your tags and posts easily with Delicer, find relevant sites, speed your delicious activities, social sharing with WordPress, RSS syndication, exporting bookmarks to other places, MySQLicious (mirroring bookmarks to Mysql database) and much more.