I recently interviewed del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, who is now\nwith Yahoo after the popular social bookmarking service was acquired last December.\nJoshua was recently named as top innovator of the year by MIT Technology Review Magazine.\nTagging is one example of an innovation that del.icio.us pioneered (at least in its\ncurrent form). Joshua told me that \"del.icio.us was the first app to showcase tagging\"\nand that now \"practically everyone uses tags in the [del.icio.us] system in some\nform.\"

But Joshua has bigger plans for del.icio.us - it will essentially turn into a social\nnetwork, with more focus on people instead of data. I learned this when I asked Joshua\nwhat kind of new functionality we can expect to see from delicious over the coming 6-12\nmonths? Joshua replied:

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\"One of the amazing things about our users is how smart and far-reaching their\ninterests are. While delicious previously has been very much about just the data, in the\nfuture I hope to allow our users themselves to come forward within the system.\nAdditionally, I want to help people connect with others within the system, either\nto people they already know or discovering new people and communities based on\ninterest.\"
\n (emphasis mine)

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This points to a social networking future for del.icio.us, perhaps more so than a\ncontent bookmarking one (which it currently is). delicious already has a 'Your network' feature, but that basically just\nconnects users' bookmarks. I think what Joshua is talking about is expanding this into a\nmore full-featured social networking system - with commenting, groups, etc. Perhaps\nsimilar to Imeem, which combines content browsing\nwith social networking.

It's interesting to compare Joshua's thoughts here to our previous post on\nRead/WriteWeb - Social\nNetworking: Time For A Silver Bullet. In that post Ebrahim Ezzy talked about how\n\"numerous social networks will proliferate - each with unique form and function.\" So it's\neasy to see how a social network based on bookmarking, a la delicious, can thrive.

Comparing del.icio.us to StumbleUpon

Recently on Read/WriteWeb we\ndid a post comparing the\ntop social bookmarking services, which showed that del.icio.us was behind StumbleUpon\nin terms of users. del.icio.us announced a couple of weeks\nago that they have 1,000,000 users, while StumbleUpon claims 1,271,345. I asked Joshua\nwhat he thought the differences were between del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. He replied:

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\"Delicious is about extending memory and saving things for yourselves and others.\nStumbleupon is much more about surfing, like TV, or maybe Tivo.\"

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I also asked about del.icio.us' growth and how they've managed the scaling process.\nJoshua told me that \"because of the explosive growth, we're are always working on\nscaling\", however they are \"extremely happy with delicious' growth to this\npoint\".

The real interest though is in how delicious makes the transition from a\ncontent-focused site, to one where people are more to the fore. I look\nforward to seeing how Joshua and his team implement social networking features into\ndel.icio.us.