Ok I admit it, while I had heard of Del.icio.us some time ago I had not bothered to really pay attention to it. So when my business partner queried me about it I decided to finally have a look. Del.icio.us describes their service as "a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's." And after looking at it I'm not quite sure what all the fuss is about. Is it truly a must use for finding nuggets of info on the 'Net?
Well at first I didn't see it but after a little digging I'm willing to give it some time and see if it really is useful. Why? Well because if you start doing some searches on topics you're interested you do come up with a lot of results and some of it very timely. But the question is how relevant is it? And it is time consuming going through all the recent posts. Their RSS feed helps there and I suppose I could write a program to filter out the garbage. One other aspect of the service that I was curious about was how much traffic does Del.icio.us refer to the SpaceRef network of sites. After a quick look at the main SpaceRef site and NASA Watch Del.icio.us doesn't appear in our top 100. Also out of curiosity I also did some reasearch on our competitors and the pattern I expected to see was there. I have to think though based on what I've seen, their referral traffic from Del.icio.us is also low.
So like I said I think it might be a usefull tool so I'm going to keep an eye it and let you know what I think. In the meantime here's a really good interview by Dave Taylor of some experts on the subject.