Ok, so I guess it’s not necessarily secret just because it isn’t advertised. I stumbled onto some discussion about the my favorite web app, del.icio.us. No big deal, lots of people are talking about it. What makes this one different is that it’s a discussion with Joshua Schachter. He is the creator of the app, and the discussion about features and ideas goes back to December of 2003. I’ve been reading it all day learning about the reasoning behind the design. I must admit that del.icio.us has a certain genius to it in terms of design. Reading the notes is like being backstage at a great play, and hearing the director comment on his reasons for the choices he made. I really wish he’d open up the source for del.icio.us, but at the same time, for security reasons I can also see why he’d probably prefer not to. I’ve been sitting around in my spare time at work trying to figure out a good model for it so I can homebrew my own version. It will take time and I’m hoping to fire up a java-based solution with Struts and Tiles, but it’ll be interesting to see what the schema looks like. Joshua said in a recent interview that he’s using mod_perl, HTML::Mason, and MySQL. I’d sort of like to try running a del.icio.us clone in java just to how it stacks up with load testing to simulate the 50k+ users that del.icio.us has.
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That’s probably true. I still worry about the security hazards to the site because I like it so much. I’m sure there are many safeguards in place to prevent the site from automated assault, but it’s still worrysome.
del.icio.us is great, but I must say I’m a bit hesitant to put all my eggs in one basket when the basket is proprietary. It has been great to have it as a completely free service, but there is no gurantee that it will continue to be this way in the future. Unless someone protects the concept from patent by releasing it under a public license, I’ll continue to worry. Hopefully, and I’m optimistic, the concept of public, shared bookmards will spread and permeate into bulletin boards, blogs, and more. It seems like a way of helping the internet learn, by building paths to better connect the nodes. It would be maddening to have a SCO jump in and claim to own the idea.
Comment by Barry 03.06.05 @ 11:02 amLeave a comment
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I don’t think it’s security reasons that he doesn’t open the source. Part of the del.icio.us magic is the fact that a network’s value is the square of the number of nodes.
If everyone had their own del.icio.us site then we wouldn’t be able to aggregate tags, we wouldn’t have a popular page and we couldn’t stumble on people with great links as easily. All those things happen because everyone is on the same site.
Comment by George Hotelling 03.04.05 @ 8:16 am