I agree, there are things that I'd like to see in del.icio.us that will probably never happen. I think I remember your discussion before, Timothy about additional fields. Personally, I prefer the way that Furl handles it where you have a field for comments, a field for "clips" (excerpts from the page), a field for keywords, as well as the title, and topics (their version of tags).
Of course not all of their users actually use those fields, in fact, probably the small minority do consistently. But those people that take the time and effort to document things more thoroughly are contributing to the real value of the service. The more information the better.
I use del.icio.us as my primary now because I like the way it handles tags a lot better than the way Furl does. And the community seems to be more active simply because it's larger, which helps me be exposed to more things. But I do miss the flexibility of having both keywords and classification (tags/topics).
As Erica said, yes, it's really probably part of a bigger issue overall... what is del.icio.us's motivation to cater to it's users? What are it's users value to it? We don't pay for the service directly or through ad revenue so what can we expect? My guess is that Yahoo bought it because of the fact that there are people placing real value on links. Our collaborative filtering and added value of commentary and classification gives Yahoo a resource that they can use for weighting relevance in their searches, for instance. From that perspective we're doing them a favor, working for them for "free". And the best way to get a lot out of your workforce is to make sure they have the right tools (and most efficient tools) to do their jobs, thereby encouraging the high producers to produce more. Generally your high producers are the minority, so if they complain about something being inefficient, you should still listen to them. Enabling them by catering to their whims may just bring about more productivity gains than doing something that the less-productive majority wants instead. It's all a matter of what Yahoo wants to gain from it.
That's all my own perspective and may not be worth anything, but there it is anyway.
Lindsay
On 4/14/06, Larson, Timothy E. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Lindsay Donaghe wrote:
> Well, people do use del.icio.us in different ways. Maybe a lot (or
Agreed, they do indeed.
> even most) people don't write long comments or comments at all, but
> others do. I think the people who do use the comments feature
> contribute a good bit to the del.icio.us community and should be
> encouraged. Many times I've depended on the comments to help me
> decide whether a link was worth clicking on.
I think pre- and post-title "extensions" (as I described several weeks
ago) would add a lot to the individual users and the community as a
whole, too. This has been my way of incorporating the title into a
description (which is the most beneficial way to do it, for me) in my
bookmark pages in the past, so I could use the desc/comment field for a
page snippet.
> It would be a very simple modification to add the maxlength attribute
> to the description and then would not cause the frustration of having
> your text truncated. You'd know immediately where the limit was.
> It's just a usability issue.
>
> I know there has to be a limit, depending on what kind of database
> you're using, the char types are typically limited at 256 characters,
> I think, so making it bigger would require changing the type which is
> a major enhancement, I know. But if that can't easily happen, keeping
> me from losing data at the start would still be nice.
My intention was not to disparage your primary idea - I think it is a
good one. I was just offering a slightly different implementation idea,
which depends on the goal trying to be achieved. The maxlength is great
for those entering in a web interface, and the truncation-with-ellipsis
is probably better for automatic imports.
For what _I_ often use the description for (quoted snippets from the
page) I'd prefer truncation-with-ellipsis even when manually entering,
because it'd be faster, as I'm not going to reword it to fit. But I'm
willing to accept that I'd probably be the minority here, and the
usability gains overall would be larger, and the extra effort for me
really isn't that much.
But the trend I've seen with del.icio.us is that even useful,
easy-implementable features will probably go unimplemented if they're
perceived as beneficial only to a small minority. That's not
necessarily good, or bad, but just the way it is. *shrug* Most people
probably won't make use of longer descriptions, just like most people
probably wouldn't make use of pre-title and post-title fields. As a
developer myself, I completely understand it - it's just not fun being
in the minority section.
Tim
--
Tim Larson
West Corporation, Interactive TeleServices
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