The Slow Sputter of Delicious
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010I’m in the ed tech field so it’s my job to keep a lookout for technologies that will make an impact in education. It’s pretty common to see technologies with great promise fizzle because of poor business decisions, a bumpy economic landscape, or maybe they’ve solved a problem that doesn’t exist yet. Does the search engine *Northern Light ring a bell? Way back in 2002 they closed their public search engine because their business model rested on advertising-supported revenue which just didn’t work for the NL demographic.
I bring this up because I’m trying to understand the slow sputter of Delicious, the self-proclaimed granddaddy of social bookmarking. Founded in 2003 Delicious was purchased two years later by Yahoo which presumably had the resources for upgrading the user interface and making social-bookmarking, well, more social. And yet innovation was slow to come. Finally, Delicious has integrated real-time search and options for sharing links with non-Delicious users. Not exactly cutting edge but it’s a step in the right direction. The problem is that it took so long that users looking to personalize the web and Search are looking elsewhere for a more robust tool. I’m not suggesting that Delicious is going to fold. On the contrary it has the most users in this market but I’m just wondering where the innovation is.
Delicious is a great tool and one that I champion again and again but I have to wonder if I need to switch, entirely, to Diigo, Delicious’ more contemporary, though lesser-known, cousin. But popularity doesn’t boil down to “better”. Diigo has taken innovation by the horns by addressing collaborative research and knowledge sharing, two fast growing areas on the web. Here’s a quick overview:
“Diigo is two services in one — it is a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other…. Diigo provides a browser add-on that can really improve your research productivity. As you read on the web, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you. You can also attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages…. You can easily share your findings, complete with your highlights and sticky notes, with friends and colleagues.”
I recently joined three Diigo special interest groups: Diigo in Education, Clif’s Notes on EdTech, and Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0. Our academic technology group also uses it to share relevant material. My point is that I’m becoming enamored with Diigo and unless I can find a way to use Delicious differently, I’ll probably abandon it all together. And I’m not sure why I feel sad about that.
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*NL reworked their mission into a ‘business research tool and as such has premium functionality for professional researchers including support for full BOOLEAN queries, as well as saved search and alerting capabilities, and our Market Intelligence Wikis.’ (http://www.nlsearch.com/home.php)