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.