I have posted the 1,000th bookmark to my del.icio.us account today.
Here is my bookmarking evolution.
At first, I wasn’t using bookmarks at all. I didn’t have my own computer,so there was no point. And there were only a handful of sites that I was visiting, so, again, there was no point.
Later I go myself a computer and bookmarks started to multiply. They were all in one folder, and then they grew out of it, so I had to create some sort of hierarchy.
Then I got myself another computer and an office workstation. My bookmarking rate decreased since I didn’t have any means of synchronizing bookmarks between computers. I was adding bookmarks slower and not using them at all. My favourite sites were still in my memory and not computer’s.
The need for a good bookmark manager was growing though. I wrote a few scripts that synchronized my data between computers, but it was still a pain. Too often the needed machine was offline…
Then came Google. Somehow it stopped the whole bookmarking process. And I wasn’t the only one. Many many many people forgot about bookmarks altogether. Finding it again was so much faster and simplier with Google that everyone were doing just that.
With Google and the progress of the technology the Web grew fast. Lots of amazing stuff got published on the web. Finding something specific is still simple. But there are whole bunch of these things that you see once and then forget about them, until you need them long way down the road. By the time you need them, you don’t even remember what exactly they were - just some vague association. Googling for something vague doesn’t work very well. At least for me. So the need for something else was growing again. Google was good, but it wasn’t enough.
And so it came - del.icio.us. I was so glad to find! From the start my usage of it was pretty extensive. I was posting lots of stuff, tagging, re-tagging, importing and exporting, building statistics, and doing all sorts of crazy things. It was exactly what I needed.
And it still is.