Nilesh D Kapadia

Yahoo! has bought del.icio.us. Just goes to show that the dotcom boom is coming back. Small companies without a revenue stream popping up in the hopes of being bought out.

The interesting thing about this acquisition is that Yahoo already has a social bookmarking product called "My Web 2.0." It has one feature that del.icio.us does not have: the ability to search the content of yours and your friends' bookmarks. I wonder if they are going to merge the two, and if they do, what it's going to look like in the end. del.icio.us certainly could use the ability to search bookmarked content. I might actually start using it with the addition of that feature.

The ability to search your own bookmarks (as well as your friends') is a pretty powerful feature that I've actually been wanting myself and started writing my own software for a while ago (and I was surprised to learn about My Web 2.0 because its almost exactly what I was envisioning). I don't have anything release-worthy yet (too many rough edges), but its working great so far, at least for single-user purposes. I am considering open sourcing it, but have not made a decision on that yet. If anything, I will at least put a binary release up once its ready for anyone willing to look at it.

I am also interested in if Google is going to release something comparable. I'm surprised they haven't already, you'd think someone over there would use their 20% to work on such a project. Their "Personalized Search" does something close (without the social features), but has a long way to go and could use a lot of user interface improvements.

The fact that the search engine giants already have their search technologies in place gives them an edge in products like this, because I think search is going to be the most important element of it. Combined with the power of social networks that can identify what content is important to them, this could result in much more relevant search results.

Searching yours and your friends bookmarks is a pretty useful at guaranteeing results that are free of spam. But what would also be interesting is to be able to specify degrees of seperation in your search, so that you can also search friends of friends.