Filed under: Internet, Internet Tools
Delicious vs. .Mac bookmark syncing
Dave
Chartier and I were talking about Del.icio.us earlier today, in the secret TUAW offices in Reese Witherspoon's guest
house. He loves Delicious, and I had never used it. For years now, I've been happily chugging along with .Mac's
bookmark syncing feature, and my own organization of the bookmark bar. Yet, at Dave's suggestion, I gave Delicious a
try. After installing Delibar and exporting my
bookmarks with Safarilicious, I was ready to go.The Delicious Pros
First of all, it's very easy to add a bookmark. Just add the droplet to your menubar and give it a click. Next, the tagging is just great. By adding tags to my bookmarks (like "apple," "blog," "daily" or "family") I can easily find the site (or group of sites) I'm looking for. The social aspect is also very appealing. If I want to find sites that other users have tagged as "apple" or "tech," that's a snap.
Finally, I have access to my bookmarks from any internet enabled computer, on any operating system. You can't beat that. I can even add bookmarks to my collection from any of those random machines. Sounds great, and it is. But I'm not going to use it. Here's why.
The Delicious Cons
This may sound petty, but it's huge to me. No "open in tabs." I keep my bookmarks highly organized, and I have several folders that categorize links into "Daily," "Apple," "WIN," etc. The first thing I do each morning is right-click on the "Daily" folder and select "Open in tabs." I then move from tab to tab, closing ones I'm not interested in and keeping the good ones open for more thorough inspection later. While Delibar allows for greater organization than a plain old browser does, it won't allow for my "open in tabs" routine. Plus, it only lets me open one link at a time, and each in a new window! That is totally unacceptable.
Also, I'm not going to keep a web page open just because it contains my bookmarks. The bookmark bar was invented to extinguish this annoyance. Now, I understand that I can subscribe to Delicious RSS feeds, and that's great, but I really like to have my sites open in a series of tabs. It's just my preferred way to work.
What I Like About .Mac
Well, several of the Delicious pros are a part of .Mac's bookmark sync. I can access my bookmarks from any internet enabled computer by going to bookmarks.mac.com, and I can add a new link to any of the folders I created on my Mac at home from the computer I happen to be using (be it a Mac, a Windows machine or what have you). Aside from the social aspect of Delicious, this is what's most appealing to me. Speaking of social bookmarking...
What .Mac Could Learn from Delicious
No tagging. Once you've created a bunch of tags, you miss them when they're gone. For highly organized neatnicks like me, creating and utilizing tags upon tags is very satisfying. I just don't get that with Safari. Also, the social aspect of Delicious-that is, the ability to browse other people's bookmarks-is way cool and something that would be a great feature of .Mac. I'd love to see this implemented some day.
Conclusion
Delicious is fantastic, but it simply doesn't fit my personal style of working. I'm not knocking it in any way, but I just like to be able to "categorize" sites as either "interesting," "follow-up" or "ditch it" on the fly. Plus, aside from the tagging and sharing, .Mac lets me do what I want to do with my bookmarks: Access and add to them from any computer. For now at least, I'm sticking with .Mac.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Stacey said 8:19AM on 3-07-2006
One thing you forgot... Del.icio.us is free... .Mac is not free.
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Steve in Denmark said 8:27AM on 3-07-2006
It looks to me very much like yet another site/thing I didn't realise I could live without.
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notverypc said 8:36AM on 3-07-2006
I kind of "run" my own .Mac. My hosting company provides me with webDAV access. I keep all my bookmarks in all my browsers (Safari & Camino) on both my macs (iMac & iBook) in sync using Bookit. (http://everydaysoftware.net/bookit/)
Not as simple as .Mac but alot cheaper and I can use Camino as well.
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Stuart McIntyre said 8:43AM on 3-07-2006
Take a look at Mozilla's new Flock browser too, as this has delicious integration built in, plus loads of other great new features, like on-the-fly blog editing and so on. It works great on the Mac too...
Stuart
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fanguad said 8:46AM on 3-07-2006
Another option (the one I use) is Sitebar (http://sitebar.org/features.php). This is more like .Mac bookmarks than delicious. It *sort of* allows for sharing... you can have a private folder and a public folder, and anyone can see your public folder. I like having a private folder so I can toss internal work links in there without sharing them with the whole world. That was the big killer for me with delicious - I couldn't mark bookmarks as private, which meant I couldn't keep *all* my bookmarks in delicious.
Sitebar pros:
Public and private bookmarks
*Does* have open in tabs (if you middle-click on a folder), although it doesn't work 100%
Multiple ways to view your bookmarks - folder tree, web page, RSS
Firefox plugin, or works great with Firefox sidebar
Sitebar cons:
Doesn't work as well with non-Firefox browsers - you need to keep a separate tab or window open.
No tagging.
No social bookmarking.
Works best if you have your own webhost, although sitebar.org lets you create an account.
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Mark said 9:28AM on 3-07-2006
You can grab RSS of your Del.icio.us bookmarks by tag as well, so if you're grouping your bookmarks together properly, you could subscribe to a subset in Safari using RSS and then open in tabs from there, right? Since that activity is likely limited to one computer as part of your daily routine, it would be a reasonable substitute for that ability...until someone creates a solution.
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chris said 9:50AM on 3-07-2006
One thing I think you are overlooking is that your life/work style does not have to include one OR the other, .Mac bookmarks OR del.icio.us.
For everyday websites that you visit over and over again, like your "daily" set, it wouldn't make sense to use del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is not good at that. Your current bookmarking, synching, and tab opening, way is great, and I do the same exact thing.
.Mac bookmarks on the other hand are terrible for capturing random sites or articles that you just don't want to lose, but don't necessarily want to read everyday. That's where tagging and sharing works best - that random article about 3 column CSS layout, that sweet new concept car from VW, nip-slip pictures of Lindsey Lohan, whatever. In the old days, I had columns and columns of bookmarked shit that I never really used again, inside a bookmark folder labelled "misc." Not good. Del.icio.us is perfect for the hundreds of these sites/articles/content/etc I encounter daily.
In addition, as a blog editor, you might love the various RSS publishing options you have with del.icio.us. On my blog, and many others, I maintain a "sideblog" of quick links with descriptions, using my normal public del.icio.us feed (and a small Wordpress plugin). I just make sure that I add a quick description of each site I bookmark with del.icio.us. It works great, and it means that my site constantly has some new content even though I am not doing anything differently.
So now that I have written too much and feel like the biggest nerd ever, my simple point is that you should be using both your .Mac bookmarks (for daily or frequently visited websites) AND del.icio.us (for random, archive, interesting CONTENT). Then you'll be getting the best of both worlds.
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LD said 9:59AM on 3-07-2006
I have found that Foxmarks is about the best bookmark synchronizer yet. I used to swear by Chipmarks but they are too flaky and their server goes down a lot. Foxmarks keeps your bookmarks locally and syncs them. So if their server isn't up, I sitll have my bookmarks.
Granted, it's not Safari, but I loathe Safari.
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Marcos said 10:14AM on 3-07-2006
If you use Firefox (but not yet available in Camino) you can subscribe to the RSS and it shows like a bookmark folder in the Bookmarks menu. This is pretty cool and even has an Open in Tabs option.
The drawback for me is that on my Mac I use Camino (and before that Safari) and only use Firefox at work.
Also, I'd like to keep my bookmarks private, and I don't know if that is possible with del.icio.us or if there is a suitable replacement that's as easy to use as del.icio.us.
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Don said 11:34AM on 3-07-2006
Also, if you use Firefox, you can set the properties of anything in your bookmarks menu to open in a sidebar.
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Shiira said 12:04PM on 3-07-2006
A workaround the whole open in tabs thing is to use shiira, which can open anything thrown at it in a new tab, or in a current window, which is why I continue to use it. The private browsing that actually sticks helps a lot too; I hate having to click enable private browsing every time I start up safari.
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michael said 12:38PM on 3-07-2006
Nice analysis of the feature-to-feature pros and cons of each service. However, one of the things that makes del.ico.us so popular is that it is a *social* bookmarking service. When you use it you are participating in a community and contributing to a link popularity contest. I understand that this isn't important to many of us but it does go a long way to explaining why del.ico.us is so popular.
I'd even go so far as to say that the social aspect is the main draw for del.ico.us.
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Xenedar said 10:12PM on 3-07-2006
>One thing you forgot... Del.icio.us is free... .Mac is not free.
But it doesn't work the way he wants. Cost isn't everything. I'd rather pay some money to get a product or service that works the way I want, rather than "settle" for a free solution that doesn't (or can't be made to).
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Xenedar said 10:33PM on 3-07-2006
>I'd even go so far as to say that the social aspect is the main draw for del.ico.us.
For me, it's the main reason not to. I'm not interested in anyone else's opinion of my bookmarks, and I'm not interested in hearing about anyone else's, let alone finding out whether my bookmarks are regarded as "cool" or not. That's, like, totally high-school.
Anyway, that's why I plan on never getting involved in it. I guess others must find it worthwhile.
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Philipp said 5:45AM on 3-08-2006
What's the problem with using both? While I love delicious (especially in combination with spurl.com), I can still use the bookmarks in Safari, like I used to. The difference is just that you don't have to clutter your local bookmarks with scores of random pages that you bookmark while going along. The neatly sorted, regularly needed stuff stays in Safari, the rest goes to delicious.
Ah, by the way: delimport allows you to search your delicious bookmarks with Spotlight. Pretty neat.
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Philipp said 5:51AM on 3-08-2006
#14 It never occurred to me to use del.icio.us to find out whether my bookmarks are cool or not (I'm pretty sure, they're rather on the lame side). But by skimming through del.icio.us/popular I have happened across a lot of interesting pages that I would never have seen without it.
Maybe that people try to show off with how cool their bookmarks are, but I don't think that this is all this is about.
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