Have you heard of del.icio.us already? Chances are you have heard of its recent acquisition by Yahoo, or possibly of its recent (unrelated) outage due to power failures. If you have, then maybe you are wondering what all the hub-bub is about. To sum it up one sentence:

del.icio.us is a social book marking website that keeps all of your bookmarks on their website so you can access them from any computer.

When I say social I mean anyone can see your links and you can see everyone else’s. The nice thing about this is that you can access your bookmarks from anywhere. No longer will you be at work trying to remember the URL of a site you bookmarked at home. You can even tag the bookmarks to categorize it with other similar sites. The tags are made up entirely by you and how it makes sense in your mind. Planning a trip? Start book marking all the travel sites and hotel links and keep all of it under one tag called “vacations” for easy reference. The only limitation is that you need to use one word per category. Of course tags like AustralianVacation (one word) would be perfectly legal.

I just sent up an account the other day and overall it seems useful but to be honest, I just can’t see myself becoming totally reliant upon it yet. Maybe I’m missing something though but it fails to be more to me then just a glorified bookmark repository. Considering all the buzz about it, I was expecting a bit more in terms of web surfing and how it would change my habits. I’ll have to test it out a bit more but I’m not ready to give up my local bookmarks just yet. I could see using this for random sites but everyday bookmarks might tend to get lost and lose their prominence on the page. Additionally, I would really like the ability to mark some bookmarks private (like work specific URL’s) that I don’t want anyone being able to click and look at.

If you do decide to test it out there are a few necessities that I recommend. First, find and download the Firefox extension that allows book marking and tagging on the fly (assuming you use Firefox). Otherwise you’ll have to navigate from the site you want to bookmark to del.icio.us’ site to add it and tag it. Also figure out how to back up your critical bookmarks (maybe by tagging them as such). It has an export capability into a browser friendly version and considering the recent complaints about their outage, you might want to have a back up plan.