12 frogs – Lunch with Mr. Delicious

Posted
25 October 2005 @ 4pm

Lunch with Mr. Delicious

The Berkman Center for the Internet & Society’s luncheon series guest today was Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us. I managed to rsvp in time to get a seat — apparently more than twice the usual number of folks wanted to hear what Schachter had to say. I know del.icio.us has changed the way I manage information online — it is the best thing to hit the browser since tabs.

I wrote what follows based on my notes from the session; quotes are what I think Schachter said, as close as I could capture in real time. (I had intended to blog in real time, but while the Berkman folks provide a tasty free lunch they do not provide wifi access to the non-crimson affiliated from inside their buildings. If only these events were held in the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, where you can get on their network. Bizarre, but true.)

The birth of del.icio.us

Del.icio.us evolved from the now-defunct muxway. He was getting bored with memepool (muxway was really a way to keep track of links that he would later feed to memepool) and originally thought to build something that was a cross between the two. Then a friend suggested building something that was halfway between muxway and Friendster instead, because that would be much bigger. [I officially now recognize there was a point in Friendster existing --- this was it.]

His elevator pitch for del.icio.us, in its entirety: “it is a way to remember things.”

Statistics

Right now, there are about 5 million links and more than 10 million posts, with an average of two tags per item. There are 500,000 unique tags, and this number grows slowly because most people use tags that have been used before. The kinds of items “remembered” on delicious have shifted from 25% to 17% hardcore techie. A third of users sign up and never come back — two-thirds follow through, which is a pretty good.

Schachter said it could be difficult to track language use because tags are short, often abbreviated, technical (what language is java?), or the tags are in a different language than the tagged item. He did say that non-English usage is high “enough that people complain about it.” They don’t want to see it, but he likes the idea of the internet not being English-only in on people’s radar.

People who don’t get it

Schachter said that “I wind up in hostile arguments about tagging and why it is wrong.” He said people don’t like it because it is “messy.” (Who are people? Librarians. As a person with an MLS, this embarrasses me. It is also another indication of why I am not in a traditional library job.)

He didn’t start del.icio.us so people can categorize the web — he did it so they can find it later.

What’s next?

Groups are going to be rolling out soon — the ability to join or follow a group’s tags. I think this will be sweet. Sort of rollyo for bookmarks, delivered in an rss stream.

There are eight employees now — is there a business model?

Someone told him they didn’t understand the financial model. Schachter replied that it was “the same model as any other advertising-backed discovery engine” like google. Only there is no advertising — and the “yet” rippled through the crowd. Schachter said that right now, “people using it are paying us with information.” The first ads may be served to people who aren’t registered users: he said that at any given time, there are ten times more viewers not logged in than logged in, and they’ll do something with that first.