My last techie post talked about the social graph and Six Apart’s efforts to open that up. One of the points I made is that opening that info up allows consumers to have more choices about using best-of-breed services. One of these types of services is del.icio.us. I’ve written about them before, and many of you know that I’m a fan and an avid user.

It may not have been clear to everyone why opening up a social graph matters to a specific service like del.icio.us, so here’s my quick explanation. First, the folks at del.icio.us posted this great video explaining social bookmarking for non-techies:

Take that social aspect they describe and imagine if you suddenly added in everyone in your Facebook or LinkedIn or MySpace network were getting updates of this stuff. Right now, you can do stuff like this in, say, Facebook, by using their posted items functionality, but it’s not the same or as good as del.icio.us. The only good thing is that my network gets notified in their news feed that I’ve posted something. With what Six Apart is proposing, sites could build this sort of functionality separately and make it possible to use a best-of-breed product while still maintaining your social graph evenly, everywhere.

In fact, that’s a great idea for a startup. Just manage the news feed by providing a way for users to authorize products like del.icio.us or Twitter or Pownce to publish to a single social graph/social notification service. You could build it on OpenID, so that any site the user is logged into with their OpenID implies that that site is authorized to publish to their news feed… Hmmm. I guess Twitter could do this right now, if they just built a “trusted third-party site” feature. Do it!

As an aside, they don’t explain tagging very well in that video, which is probably my only criticism. Tagging is basically putting your bookmarks in categories. Instead of having a fixed category system, you can just use whatever you think will be the best reminder for the bookmark. One piece of advice, though, is to keep the number of tags per bookmark small. Don’t try to think of every or many words you might look things up by, think about how you’d drill down to that item instead.

In case anyone else is only using del.icio.us casually, del.icio.us had a major update today with new servers and some new features getting rolled out. Good stuff.

Just to explain the previous post, I’ve set up a job to copy links I’ve posted to del.icio.us over to the blog here. I read a lot of stuff and don’t always get around to writing them up, especially during weeks like this one. So, you get the simple summary version. This will come daily. I’m not sure what happens on days I don’t bookmark anything… I guess we’ll find out together.

I’ve mentioned del.icio.us a number of times on this blog. It’s really one of those services that you have to “get” in order to really appreciate. I haven’t done a great job of describing it here, but I’ve found some pretty good explanations tonight. First, one of the VC’s investing in del.icio.us describes why he did it. In his post, he links to a good screencast by Jon Udell. In it, you can watch how he uses del.icio.us (which is pretty much how I use it, too).

This is very cool:

From: Joshua Schachter
To: discuss@del.icio.us
Date: Apr 10, 2005 8:59 PM
Subject: [delicious-discuss] more on the announcement

As you may know, I left my job a few weeks ago in order to devote myself
full-time to del.icio.us. In order to make that posssible, I accepted an
investment from a group of thoughtful and influential investors. The group
I chose to work with understands my commitment to maintaining the
integrity of the service and the security of your data. They were also
willing to take a minority stake, which will keep me in control of the
future of del.icio.us.

Union Square Ventures leads the investment group, and the other members
are Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein,
Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young.

I’m very excited about this opportunity to focus on del.icio.us and put
together a team to help me grow the service. My first priority is
improving reliability and responsiveness, with new features following
soon.

That’s a pretty damn good list of investors, some of the best in the industry. All of this started with an idea to maintain a list of bookmarks. How simple is that? From that, grew a business. No idea if it will be successful or not, but the ideas he’s building around are solid and different and the resulting community and product are great. The question now is whether he can monetize this and how he’s going to do this without harming either product or community.

Good luck, Joshua.