Company: Deli.cio.us (new feature)
Previous Profile: June 16, 2005
What’s new?
Josh Schachter (the creator of del.icio.us) announced new “tags for two” functionality yesterday. It allows direct bookmarket notification to a person, to suggest they see specific content.
We first noticed a trend towards people using del.icio.us as a recommendation engine about a month ago. Fred Wilson, in addition to being THE web2.0 venture capitalist, loves music and posts regularly on music he is listening to. On June 4, 2005 he posted a request to his readers to recommend new music to him via del.icio.us:
“If you find an mp3 file with its own URL, like my MP3 of the Week, simply tag it in delicious with a tag that is clearly your own. For example, I use “fred’spodcast” as my tag. Feel free to tag mp3s with that tag if you want me to listen to them.
Then you take the RSS feed for that delicious tag, in my case http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/fred’spodcast, and burn that as a Feedburner feed.”
We noticed it, and sort of put it in the back of our mind filed under “another cool del.icio.us tool”.
Fred also set up a del.icio.us tag for his wife, Joanne. Whenever he wants her to see something on the web, he tags it “for:gothamgal”.
Brad Feld noticed this, and liked it, and posted here that he set up something similar for himself – “If you run across something on the web you want me to see, just tag it.”
All of this got Josh Schachter’s attention and so he created a more structured, and private, way of doing this:
“tags for two
We’ve just begun rolling out support for tagging items for others. To do so, use “for:username” where username is the name of the user you want to send the item to.
You can see items tagged for you at http://del.icio.us/for/ (it’ll redirect to your own page, which other users will not be able to see.)”
Link
Brad Feld then posted an update to his original request here.
So, bottom line, any delicious user can now have a private recommendation tag. To recommend stuff to me, tag it “for:marrington” and I will be able to view it at ” http://del.icio.us/for/marrington” (although this will not be public).
It’s a nice feature, although I would like an option to make it public. I think it would be interesting to share these recommendations with everyone. There are also concerns being expressed about spamming incentives. Over time, I can see “blacklists” being created for “bad users”, although it would be easy for people to simply create new delicious accounts.
Relevant Links:
delicious blog post on this
Brad Feld (#1) (#2)
fred wilson on music recommendations
Jay Knight
Sinceretheory
Tags: Delicious, tagsfortwo, del.icio.us, web2.0, RSS, tags, tagging, web2.0, techcrunch