Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us visits Harvard
I attended a luncheon discussion today with Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us, sponsored by Harvard's Berkman Center. He said that Del.icio.us was the first public tagging site, a technology that is now attracting lots of interest from the major search engines. Basically, it allows users to store their browser bookmarks online, and to assign text tags to them. Anyone can search for URLs using plain text or the assigned tags, or view all the bookmarks created by any user. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds based on a combination of users and tags. The web 2.0 term for this type of socially created category scheme is a folksonomy. I have only used the system for a few searches and haven't registered to create my own tags yet, so I don't have a strong impression of its usefulness as a search engine, but the 2 dozen or so attendees at today's session were pretty rabid.
A blogpulse search shows relatively high interest in both tagging and Del.icio.us, but surprisingly folksonomy doesn't register very high.
Here are some of my notes from the meeting:
- Joshua is a pretty low key, humble guy who built the system without any real expectation of how well it would catch on. He seems to be following his instincts and user requests, rather than trying to fulfill some grand plan.
- I asked him about scaling both the technology and his role in the company, and he is taking on problems as they arise. The system is built with Mod_perl and a homegrown set of database tools. I know from my work with Slashdot that this can be scaled pretty far, but the hardware gets expensive. He has 8 employees, 6 of whom are programmers. Right now he is chief coder, architect, marketing head and CEO, which can't work for long. He said that he had just hired a President and a business development guy, but I wasn't sure if they counted within the current 8.
- 50% of his traffic is from robots. He doesn't know the cause of this, but I bet his many upcoming competitors are trying to suck his tagging database out of the system.
- Speaking of competitors, he applied for a job with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and got turned down by all of them. Now they are all adding tagging to their system, and Amazon is an investor. Del.icio.us is also being courted by companies like Comcast and Nokia.
- One of the most insightful things he said was that he refuses to post rankings of top sites, because that will just encourage people to find a way to spam the ranking system.
