I started out using Delicious for its intended purpose, bookmarking. Then I discovered that between the tags and the notes field, it was a spectacular notetaking tool. Over time, I built up a network of around a hundred other people. My Delicious use became 10% archiving and annotating links I planned to refer to later, and 90% social linkblogging. The experience became almost Quora-like.

Not that Yahoo ever did anything to encourage the social aspect. Some people made it easy to identify themselves, and I was able to connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. But most people didn’t, and to this day there are users whose writing and linkblogging I followed on a daily basis, and who I have absolutely no way of contacting.

At some point, an informal tradition emerged known as “Delicious whuffie,” named for the reputation-based currency in a Cory Doctorow story. People started tagging their bookmarks “via:username” to indicate the source of the link. Someone even made a whuffie bookmarklet that automatically added the via tag. Then Yahoo made some behind-the-scenes changes, and the via tags stopped working. The social aspect of Delicious was at that point pretty much broken beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the social web continued to evolve. I now have some other tool for almost every Delicious use case. I use my blog to gather and annotate important links. I share trivia and amusing ephemera on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I network with like-minded strangers on Twitter and now Quora. But none of them have totally replaced my Delicious network, which has been scattered to the four winds by Yahoo’s ineptitude.

One of my favorite finds on Delicious is C. Maoxian, an American finance guy living in China. Every day he posts dozens of items relating to finance, investment, real estate, and expat life in China. Just from reading the headlines of his posts and his witty comments, I get an excellent overview of these topics that I know little to nothing about. Every so often I’ll click through a link and read the whole story, but mostly Maoxian’s summary is enough. Since he uses the same handle on Twitter, I follow him there, too, but it isn’t the same — 140 characters just doesn’t do it for his style of writing.

So what do I want the YouTube guys to do? Make Delicious more like Quora. Make it social. Make it personal. Make it fun. Introduce voting and reputation. Make it like Twitter but with depth. Introduce archiving of pages you link to, so if the original page gets taken down you can still access its contents. Let us log in with Facebook or Twitter or Quora identities. Keep innovating and iterating. Be the anti-Yahoo.

Original post on Quora

Oh, Delicious. I was so excited when I discovered it a few years ago, and it’s been kind of a heartbreak since then. I started out using it for its intended purpose, as a convenient way to store my browser bookmarks online. I still use it for that, though now it’s become more of a public-facing place for research and note-taking. My bookmarks all go to my Facebook profile automatically, in case someone there might find them useful. The particularly interesting ones I also manually post to Twitter.

The heartache comes from the way Yahoo has been managing Delicious since they bought it, or more accurately, not managing it. After a halfhearted redesign, Yahoo has mostly just been ignoring it, especially its rudimentary and poorly designed social features. This is a shame, since I have yet to find a better source of news and items of interest than other users’ bookmarks. I’ve assembled a list of about a hundred people in my network, and their collective posts have a dazzlingly high signal to noise ratio. When I want to see what’s going on in the world or on the net, my Delicious network feed is the first thing I look at, before any news site or blog reader.

Flickr

I don’t take a lot of snapshots, so I’m not putting many actual photos on Flickr. I mostly use it to store graphics like the one at the top of this post. For a while I was also using Flickr as an image blog, a convenient repository for images I found on the web. Now I mostly use Tumblr for random image blogging. But I do love the way Flickr lets you tag and categorize things, it lets me gather and sort research materials in an intuitive way. Flickr is extremely well search engine optimized, and it supports a robust ecosystem of secondary aggregators and rebloggers. If you put something on Flickr and license it Creative Commons, you’re guaranteed to get a bunch of clicks on it.

Everything I post on Flickr goes to Facebook automatically. When I mark someone else’s image as a favorite, it goes to my Tumblr, and from there to Facebook, the logic being that these pictures are likely to be interesting to my friends. Since Yahoo owns Flickr, bookmarking the images on Delicious is elegant, with automatic thumbnail generation. Even so, I don’t find myself bookmarking images too often. If something is that fascinating, usually I’ll find a reason to work it into a blog post.

Tumblr

I mostly use Tumblr for stuff that’s too random or trivial to merit a full blog post. It’s an effortless one-click process to reblog someone else’s Tumblr post, so I do that a lot. I stream my Flickr favorites here because their randomness fits the Tumblr vibe well. Everything I put on Tumblr goes automatically to Facebook, because why not, and hopefully it’s not so many posts that it’s annoying to people.

Facebook

Yes, it’s evil. But all my friends are on there, and increasingly my relatives too. My policy is to only friend people I know in real life, though I’ve made a few exceptions for cool folks I’ve met on the internet. It’s convenient to have almost everyone I know in one place, but I don’t trust FB with anything too personal.

For a while I had my blog posts going to FB automatically via RSS. I had to stop, though, because the way FB handles blog feeds is so irritating. FB renders imported blog posts as static snapshots. This is no good for me, because I tend to publish my posts when they’re still a bit unfinished, and then copyedit them after they’ve gone live. It keeps me from being too fussy and precious. Also, I use my stats to guide the allocation of my finite editorial resources — posts that people are reading more, I edit more. Having static snapshots full of mistakes on FB does me no good. Also, any comments that people were making on the FB posts aren’t visible to readers here (and vice versa.) So now I manually add links to new blog posts.

Twitter

I’ve resisted the temptation to cross-post my tweets to Facebook because I find it irritating when other people do it. My FB and Twitter friend lists overlap a fair bit and I don’t like reading all those 140-character witticisms twice. Also, on FB I’m writing exclusively for people who know me personally, whereas on Twitter I’m mostly writing for strangers, so the voice and content are different. I do send recent tweets to my blog sidebar automatically, I don’t find that too spammy when other people do it.

This blog

Nearly all the substantial personal writing I’ve done for the past few years has taken place here. There’s something about the public-facing aspect of blogging that keeps my fires burning. I love the WordPress platform for the way it facilitates my creative thinking like few other computer tools I’ve used.

LinkedIn

I keep my online resume here on the blog, but I like LinkedIn a lot and foresee it playing a greater role in my professional life over time. It has its own status updates, but that’s one too many statuses for me to be updating, so I just stream my work Twitter feed in there.

Friendfeed

There was a while there when I was so infatuated with Friendfeed that I made it the centerpiece of my personal home page. What could be a better landing page than an automatic aggregate of everything else I post on the social web? Well, as it turns out, there are a lot of problems with posting an unfiltered lifestream. While a comprehensive listing of everything I post everywhere is useful and interesting to me, it’s not so useful or interesting to anyone else. Looking at other people’s lifestreams is mostly just exhausting.

There’s also the problem of duplicate content. Let’s say I bookmark something on Delicious and also post it to Twitter. Friendfeed displays both posts. There’s no way that I know of to recognize and eliminate duplicates automatically. For a while I tried deleting duplicates manually, but that was too annoying. I still keep my Friendfeed active, though, both for communitarian and cynical reasons. The communitarian reason is that there are some people out there who like the lifestreaming format. It’s not a lot of people, but they do exist. The cynical reason is search engine optimization. A link on an automatic Friendfeed post counts to Google’s spiders, even if no human ever clicks it.

So, there you have it. I’m about to embark on a new social media consulting job, and that’ll probably extend my web footprint. Like, I just joined Foursquare and Yelp, not because I have much need for them personally, but because they’re significant for clients and I need to know how they work.

This landscape shifts fast, so maybe I’ll come back to this post down the road and chuckle at how obsolete it is. I still have a MySpace profile that I can’t figure out how to delete. Who knows which of the profiles above are going to look similarly comical in a few years?