Having a taste of del.icio.us

I've decided it's high time I learn more about social networking web sites. I've used Facebook a lot and MySpace a little; this week I decided to give Delicious (also written as its actual URL, del.icio.us) a try.

According to its self-description: "Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet."

The main draw for me is to get my own browser bookmarks (1) organized, and (2) stored on the Web, where I'm trying to store everything important these days, so that I'm not dependent upon my own laptop and hard drive.

It was easy enough to get started: I signed up for a free account, and then agreed to have all of my bookmarks from Firefox imported into Delicious. By choosing certain options, I allowed Delicious to add tags to my bookmarks, based upon its own internal logic.

Having done that, I had my entire set of bookmarks stored on Delicious, and categorized by tags. The tags needed a lot of work to be really useful, but they were a good start, and tags can easily be edited. Especially interesting was the "tag cloud" view, offering a non-linear view of the relative predominance of various subjects among my bookmarks.

I haven't gone much farther yet, to sharing of bookmarks among other users, exploration of the most popular sites, broken down into countless categories, and connecting with others of similar interests and concerns, which is the central purpose of social networking web sites. But I've at least had a taste!