De.visi.ve?

del.icio.us is an interesting site. In its simplest form, it provides a sort of centralized bookmark service. Bookmarks are stored in a flat structure, with any of a number of "tags" assigned to them. Since the bookmarks are stored on the server, they are available anywhere on the net. The tags and bookmarks are absolutely public, so anybody can see what everybody else is interested in. The site as a whole forms a sort of spontaneous index of the web, sorted by popularity. del.icio.us has attracted a great deal of interest as a collaborative guide to the net as a whole.

It is not surprising that competitive sites would pop up. Still, many del.icio.us users were surprised by the debut of de.lirio.us, which differs in these significant ways:

• The name is different by at least five pixels - on a high-resolution display.

• The code is open source (though the license is unclear at the moment).

Users of del.icio.us are somewhat annoyed. The creation of an outright clone strikes many of them as dishonest, and they would rather have seen the effort go into creating a better "folksonomy" at the original site. Most of them see little reason to put any effort into an imitation of del.icio.us when they have the real thing.

The advent of de.lirio.us does raise some interesting questions, though.

Does the open-sourcing of the code justify the creation of a clone site? Steve Mallett, the creator of de.lirio.us, seems to think so. (Steve is also, incidentally, the OpenSource.org webmaster and the editor of OSDir). The Linux kernel was created for very similar reasons; it was a clone which made an established interface available as free software. To the extent that the del.icio.us interface was successful, it made sense to copy it rather than invent something new, but less effective. The new site perhaps could have tried for a slightly different look, however.

One del.icio.us user questioned the wisdom of making this sort of software free in the first place:

This is an interesting variant on the fragmentation argument: social software must remain centrally controlled or its user community will split asunder. Whether this is true - or undesirable - is irrelevant, however. People have little interest in being forced into "communities" which do not appeal to them, and, on the net at least, they will find alternatives.

Another event worth noting is that del.icio.us creator Joshua Schachter has announced his intention to make a business out of the site. Depending on where his plans take him, del.icio.us users could find themselves happier than ever. If commercialization takes the site in the wrong direction, however, many of those users who are currently upset about de.lirio.us may decide that the existence of an open source alternative is not an entirely bad thing after all.

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to post comments

De.visi.ve?

Posted Mar 31, 2005 4:03 UTC (Thu) by dhess (guest, #7827) [Link] (2 responses)

What a load of BS. Interoperability of social software is about protocols. Social software can be open-sourced without fragmentation as long as the protocol doesn't fragment. There are many examples of this (smtp, irc, jabber, bittorrent, etc.).

De.visi.ve?

Posted Mar 31, 2005 5:00 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Indeed, I have heard of a process involving "Request[s] for Comments" that has demonstrated some effectiveness.

De.visi.ve?

Posted Mar 31, 2005 10:28 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Bullshit. If there are no reason for fragmentation there will be no fragmentation. Everyone can grab the whole database and sourcecode of wikipedia. Everyone can try to build clone of LiveJournal (code is free). Yet there are a no deep fragmentation. Why ? There are no "social unrest" in userbase thus there are no need to go away. And if there are "social unrest" in userbase closed source does not help anything - site will be abandoned regardless.

Remember: there are no technical solutions to social problems and fragmentation of communities is social problem.

Remember CDDB?

Posted Mar 31, 2005 12:29 UTC (Thu) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link] (1 responses)

CDDB was an extremely popular collaborative project to collect the titles
and songlists for CDs so that CD players could automatically retrieve
those lists and display them in realtime. It was a wild success, and the
source code was GPL -- until the founders sold out and the owning company,
Gracenote, banned any non-licensed applications from accessing the
database. Those who had contributed songlists to the CDDB database
discovered that the data itself was not freely available.

So FreeDB came along and provided a truly open alternative -- both source
and data are free, and there are no restrictions on applications accessing
the FreeDB databases.

There is much to be learned from the CDDB / FreeDB experience. de.liri.ous
is probably a very good idea, especially with the news that de.lici.ous
plans to go commercial.

Remember CDDB?

Posted Apr 14, 2005 16:09 UTC (Thu) by bert.kenward (subscriber, #28573) [Link]

The difference here though, is that del.icio.us users already own their data.

De.visi.ve?

Posted Apr 1, 2005 11:32 UTC (Fri) by sjn (guest, #2775) [Link]

There's a simple solution to the concern of "community dividing": Create a protocol for transferring social bookmarks across sites! That way both projects can recognize that it's the well-being of the community that is valuable, not the products themselves...

Strictly speaking, a generalized Cross-Community Protocol could be even better - imagine being able to transfer one bug/issue from bugs.debian.org to the project's own bug tracker, keeping all context and discussion wherever the bug's currently located...

(Well, at least we're allowed to dream about these things! :)