Could Twitter kill delicious?
This is something I’ve been pondering for a little while as I’ve finally settled on my own model for enjoyable and productive (if not slightly distractive) Twitter use.
I’ve become quite accustomed to going through my Google Reader feeds, opening the articles I’m interested in within new Firefox tabs and then, at some point in the day, reading them quickly. If I find them particularly interesting, I bookmark them on delicious. The only real re-purposing I do with that feed is include the last ten on my blog homepage. I don’t refer back to them too often because those things I find of extreme importance – perhaps a reference for a paper I’m writing – will go into Zotero, the research Firefox plugin.
What got me thinking about Twitter and delicious is that I’d been considering taking some of the more interesting bookmarks and quickly tweeting them. However, if I’ve got a Twitter feed, can bookmark a shortened URL with a bit of descriptive text and have roughly the same thing as a delicious bookmark feed, albeit with an entry text length restriction. To me that’s a good thing as it forces my description to be economical (which my delicious descriptions usually are anyway).
I know it runs contrary to the original intent of quick text hits, but since Twitter’s been implementing search enhancements, power features and the like, what about tags? Would one more text field for comma separated tags bulk up the interface? If not, would this effectively have the potential to be a delicious-killer?
Does this make sense, or is it simply feature bloat and not worth considering? Thoughts are welcome.
January 30th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Hi,
Thanks for kicking off this great debate. I guess my use of delicious is different than you. My purpose is to share links to other by sending them the URL of the tag.
I for one couldn’t live without delicious.
January 30th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Hi James (great name). Yeah, I tend to refer back to them sometimes and like having a cloud bookmark list available, but with the way my social web habits seem to be evolving it becomes much more visceral and immediate and I’m finding I share more often with Twitter because my network is growing and many people simply run an app like Tweetdeck in the background. It will be interesting to see where it goes.