Switching back to del.icio.us from My Web

There are some really interesting aspects of the Yahoo! My Web tool, but none of them are compelling enough to keep me using the service as my primary bookmarking environment now that del.icio.us is part of the team here.  I do hope, however, that del.icio.us can incorporate things like:

• private bookmarks.  I was planning a trip not too long ago, and it was nice to save pages just for my own benefit.  I think this has been addressed with del.icio.us using the "for:" tag, but the My Web privacy features are nicely done.
• integration with my community.  I like looking at what my friends are saving in the My Web UI.  This is easy enough to do using del.icio.us feeds in a reader, but the My Web UI has some nice views to my community's saved pages with just a few clicks.
• my results in search.  This is the best feature of all.  I find myself clicking on Yahoo!'s personalized search results more and more these days and less and less on organic results.  I really like being able to search within the pages my community is saving as part of my default search engine UI.

Switching from My Web to del.icio.us is not fun, at this point.  I went back about 2 weeks in the My Web archives and retagged those pages in del.icio.us which basically sucked, but no other solution was obvious.  And I wasn't in the mood to hunt down a hack.  I also tagged key pages from way back in important categories.  

I almost thought I had done this transition prematurely when I started seeing the server problems this week, but I'm really pleased to be back in the del.icio.us pool.

Why?  Well, there are several reasons, but they're sometimes subtle or hard to articulate:

• One click tagging from the Firefox plugin
• Mixing my pages and tags in with a wider pool of very active taggers
• Related pages
• Open and easy-to-see namespaces
• Greasemonkey scripts galore
• RSS access to everything across all dimensions

It's not the act of saving that makes this tool so powerful.  It's the utility of the data that's in the system.and how it can be leveraged to build things.  Jon Udell got me pumped up about del.icio.us back when I was at InfoWorld, and the experiments we were able to conduct there and my own tests on The Standard web site (which are no longer live, unfortunately) woke me up to a new world.

I can't tell you how nice it is to have a meeting with the Yahoo! Search team now and discuss the world of possibilities rather than fret the competitive landscape.  It's going to take a pretty impressive tool to get me to switch from del.icio.us now.

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