Pros and Cons of Third Party Tools
Apart from its rosy, near-term fiscal prospects, Del.icio.us also has the advantage, thanks to its open architecture, of a rabid user community that has produced a plethora of tools to help users manipulate their own store of bookmarks with greater ease. The deal-clincher for me is Cocoalicious, a very sharp desktop tool for Mac OS X that allows direct, browser-free management of my Del.icio.us bookmarks. Spurl has nothing like it, as far as I can tell.
Without this surfeit of third party tools, however, Del.icio.us is a relatively poor tool for doing anything other than adding your own bookmarks and free-tagging them in a so-called folksonomy. To import my bookmarks from Spurl, I had to use Del.icio.us Loader, a nice free service from Julian Bez that, unfortunately, led me to make some tagging errors during the import process (my own fault). As a result, I needed to delete a ton of bookmarks — a real pain to do directly on the Del.icio.us Web site. There may have been a third-party tool to do this too, but I didn’t look hard enough to find one.
Mine, All Mine
Anyway, readers may have noticed that the Elsewhere section of this site is not managed with a social bookmarks service, in spite of its natural suitability for such. Ostensibly, the reason I cite for that is that Del.icio.us won’t allow me the fine-grained control over my own links that I prefer, specifically the ability to add star ratings for each.
Just as important, though, is the fact that I don’t feel entirely comfortable with storing content — and I regard those links as content — on anybody else’s server but my own. I use Del.icio.us (and before it, Spurl) purely to store bookmarks that I don’t think are appropriate for Elsewhere, bookmarks that I just want to remember for myself, not to share with others.
The Anti-Social Bookmarks Manager
It does pain me a bit to know that Elsewhere is not participating in the great social experiment that is social bookmarking, but I’m a codger when it comes to trusting others with my own content. For an enterprise that is run entirely on free time and my own passion, the content I produce on this site — whether curated links or full-fledged weblog posts — is absolutely the most important resulting asset, and I feel more comfortable with it under my own purview and no one else’s.
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