Social bookmarking is all the rage right now in the early-adopter circles. After a flurry of using the service, I’m re-categorizing my Dating bookmarks on the popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us into several groups: apps, search, value-added, marketing and advertising to start. Look in the right column, down a bit and you’ll see “Del.icio.us Bookmarks.” It’s set to dating apps right now, will add other categories later.
Recently, an analyst with Union Square Ventures, who funded Del.icio.us, contacted me about using the service as a dating tool. He had that dismissive “I don’t see the business model” view of their competitors, which I’ve grown to ignore, but he did open my eyes to the value of social bookmarking in a way I hadn’t thought about it previously.
If open profiles a la Mark Pincus (ex Tribe.net CEO and founder) take off, Del.icio.us is in a position to be a central aggregator of profiles. The problem there is that people have to actively submit their profile to the site, or have someone else bookmark their profile. A crawler could be built to crawl profiles, grabbing the meta-data and implementing search functionality. Mike Jones are you reading this?
Del.icio.us is a good example of a Web 2.0 application. The path the viable revenue model is unclear. Advertising dollars would be the easy way. Who are they going to charge? Pay for placement in a social bookmarking service? If they want to position themselves as collaborative-filtered search, thats another option. When the service stops looking like Windows 3.1 and is marketed(beta forever), perhaps the groundswell of popularity will make is useful enough to regular users. Someone needs to show me where the reward is for posting bookmarks. Del.icio.us reminds me of the DMOZ open directory or early Yahoo!- submit a link, and if we think it’s appropriate, we’ll post to the directory. Until it’s better than Google, it’s a curiosity for most. How long will it be until people start going to Del.icio.us instead of their favorite search engine?
In the meantime, go read yesterday’s article in the NYTimes about Yahoo My Web, which discusses Del.icio.us, Technorati, and how Yahoo hopes to capitalize on the popularity of viral marketing and group filtering.
