Collaborative Bookmarking... UNLEASHED 11
Like many… I’ve been using del.icio.us for several years and so have some of my closest colleagues. A few of us at PLANET ARGON have been using the for:username tag to send each other links, which has been a great productivity hack as we don’t need to copy URLs and paste them into emails, IMs, or IRC channel windows anymore. One of the things that del.icio.us doesn’t have a totally perfect implementation is sending to a group. There are people in your network, but to my knowledge, there isn’t a way to send everyone in a network the same link without selecting everyone individually. This was adding more time to the process of saving a link for ourselves and our fellow team members. So, we came up with a clever hack… a new delicious user account.
Over the past four months, our team has bookmarked almost four hundred links on topics ranging from Rails plugins, Interaction Design, Business processes, cool new web applications, to any variety of things that we find relevant to our team.
So, all of the links are being sent to a fake user. How do we see the links for that user without having to logout of our current user and into the planetargon account? Well, what we’ve done is take the delicious RSS feed and pipe it through feedburner and given everyone the URL that feedburner provides. Now, we’re all able to subscribe to the same feed and check out links when each of us has time for it.
...and this is what I get to see show up in my RSS reader. :-)
How is your team managing bookmarks? :-)
Enjoying the content? Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.
How is my team managing bookmarks?
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at that.
I’ve been working on a web app that lets you share bookmarks amongst a private group. It also allows for commenting on each link. It’s also a feed reader, so you can share interesting blog posts amonst the group as well. Check it out in its current state:
http://www.nondenumerable.com
This is a great “hack” but I don’t know of any serious business that would want to become dependent on del.icio.us—no strategist in his or her right mind would do that. Imagine having to explain to an investor “uh yeah, sorry dude but we just got screwed because del.icio.us changed something or they want out of business or someone else bought them and made some changes so now our habit-formed dependence on them is causing us business disruption and that is affecting your monetary investment but that’s ok because we are hackers not business people”
Umm… Eddie, they are just links. If del.icio.us closes shop who cares, just google for the info.
Well, we have developed a really simple web app for sharing what we call one minute lasting urls. FYPurl is intended to share URLs between members of a collocated team, so one of us can say “hey, look at this, it’s in my fyp” and everyone in the room can navigate to the same web page quickly.
Anthony,
I appreciate the “hack” but my point is that del.icio.us shouldn’t be required / depended on as a tool.
Eddie,
Are you going to tell me that you or your company of employment doesn’t rely on any online services?
Should I stop using Flickr, Basecamp, Highrise, Lighthouse, Gmail, Feedburner, Google Analytics, or any of the several dozen online applications that I’m using… because they could be purchased and have their business model changed?
You’re quite the pessimist. ;-)
I agree with Anthony… they’re just links… and our business isn’t dependent on them. Having this is nothing more than a collaborative area to send each other links. If yahoo sold del.icio.us tomorrow and the site went down… I think our small investment of link harvesting would be disappointing for a brief period of time and we’d then find something else.
That’s kind of neat…
We have a company forum, some kind of project portal thing that’s with Visual Studio Team System, and I’m pretty sure we have a wiki, too. But mostly we just use email for things like this.
I’m trying to follow your description, but I’m having a problem with authentication. I took the delicious “for” feed, which has a private token in the URL, and pasted it into feedburner. However, no items show up when I read the feedburner feed in my rss reader. Am I missing something here?
And I did post a few items as a different user with a proper for:... tag :-) They are visible when I log into delicious, but not in the feedburner feed…
What was the reason you had to use Feedburner?
There are groups in ma.gnolia – didn’t they work for you?