on delicious
Ari Paparo has some interesting notes on what made delicious succeed where his company (doing essentially the same thing in 1999 with 13 million dollars) failed. Two things that really resonated with me were: defaults matter and folders suck.
Ariās site blink.com made bookmarks private by default but allowed users to share themāwhereas delicious makes them public. This encouraged looking at the bookmarks globally as the purpose of the service, whereas with blink it was an afterthought.
What Ari says about why folders suck was so good Iām going to take the liberty of just quoting a big chunk of it.
We believed that users would not only make their folders public, but also would categorize those folders into a directory structure. We called this the āPublic Libraryā and created a Yahoo-like node structure on which users could post. This could have made sense since categorizing folders would be less work than categorizing individual bookmarks ā after all, the folders were already ācategoriesā of a sort.
There were several severe problems with this folder-based approach. First, people are very bad and inconsistent at organizing things. One day etrade.com will go into the āfinanceā folder and another day it will go into the āfavorite linksā folder. We were taking this fundamental flaw and squaring it ā asking users to use graph their existing categorization onto a second arbitrary structure within the public library. Does my āfinanceā folder go into the āBusinessā directory or the āPersonalā directory?
Then there was the issue of how deep to go when categorizing folders. If Iāve got a folder of āonline brokeragesā do I put it in the directory at the level of āFinanceā since my folder is in a sense a sub-category of finance, or do I put it within the pre-existing āFinance -> Brokerageā directory? Users were confused, and with good reason.
Even librarians arenāt always that great at categorizing things. We need lots of rules, and donāt always remember to follow all of them. Itās a tricky business :-)
Case in point I donāt even use the tag ātaxonomyā consistently (see screenshot above). delicious has a new feature that provides guidance on what tags youāve used, and how many times ā when you are typing in a tag. This is extremely handy for displaying just how inconsistent I amā¦and how to improve the quality of my tags.