Archive for March, 2007
As mentioned recently in this blog, we’re working on a lot of improvements for del.icio.us. We’ve just posted a survey as a way to get feedback and opinions from you, the users. We want to make sure that we’re focusing on the right things, fixing what’s busted and not busting the stuff that already works. It’s not very long as surveys go, and hopefully it’s not too über-corporate. Thanks for taking the time to tell us what you think. We’ll be posting a summary of the results a few weeks after the survey closes.
March 30th, 2007
We passed our two millionth user signup at the beginning of this month. Because we’ve been very busy keeping up with the load, we didn’t have time to come up with something up to our normally high standard of wit (I was going to refer to server smoke but it seems I did that last time) so here is a cat picture I found on the internet.
March 29th, 2007
Did you know that well over half of the requests seen by del.icio.us are for RSS feeds? That means that people cruising around our site in browsers are actually in the minority, when it comes down to raw traffic. Instead, our heaviest hitters include personalized home pages, desktop news aggregators, and even stranger things.
With that in mind, it makes sense to remember that small changes can have a big impact. Thus, given that our feeds have been doing a decent job this far, they haven’t changed much from their austere beginnings.
Decent isn’t great, though. So, as the team’s semi-official (and published!) feed junkie, I’ve been working on some small improvements. I’ve been looking into how our feeds are used and how to better streamline and present our information in different contexts. These improvements include features like:
- including tag descriptions in feed titles and descriptions where available;
- offering the ability to save bookmarks straight from your feed reader;
- displaying an up-to-date count of saves, without making items appear new again in feed readers;
- building more useful feed content with links to people, tags, and more bookmark details;
- providing more metadata where it seems useful, or less where it appears redundant.
And, this is just the start. We’re rolling these changes out gradually, on a per-user-agent basis, and we’re planning for more. So, if you don’t see any improvements in your favorite feed reader yet—or if the changes haven’t quite hit their mark for you—be sure to contact us and let us know!
March 21st, 2007
Sometimes one word just isn’t enough to know what a tag really means. For example, when I was working as an IT administrator for a non-profit agency, I was scrambling to find a free or low-cost tracking system I could use to manage their IT issues in a sane fashion. I went into research mode and bookmarked a lot of sites under my “issuetracking” tag. Now, looking back, I wish I could comment a little on that tag about what I found and what I ultimately decided to do… but how? Enter our latest feature: tag descriptions.
For any of your tags, you can now add a public title and description to appear at the top of the page. It may just be to remind yourself of what it is or to tell others more about it. To get started, just visit one of your tags and click “create description” (at the top). As always, we don’t presume to know exactly how you’ll use this or what about it will be most valuable to you, so we welcome your feedback and suggestions!
March 14th, 2007
