I’m determined to get to grips with del.icio.us. For now, I’m still having real trouble typing the name, with the dots in the right places. But I’m beginning to see the value of it.
The official del.icio.us extension for Firefox is pretty good. It gives you some lovely big icons in your main browser toolbar – but it has its problems. For one, I couldn’t get Firefox to remember my password… so the big del.icio.us icon just dumped me on the homepage, still two clicks away from my own territory. Plus it didn’t remind me what tags I was already using.
Enter delicious.mozdev.org, which does the things you want it to do, albeit a bit on the ugly side. It shows all your bookmarks in a Firefox sidebar, which makes for a much more familiar user experience. It lists all your available tags when you want to add a new item, and gives you a countdown towards the 255 character limit on descriptions. Only problem? – the functionality hides in the right-click menu. But I can cope with that.
So far, my main finding is that del.icio.us simply isn’t being used by many Brits. Sites you’d expect to be bookmarked by hundreds of UK-based web users, generally only count a few del.icio.us users. Only 250 people have tagged the National Rail site, for example? Just 19 have tagged the BBC Sport homepage? Barely 50 people have tagged the Arsenal FC homepage?