Delicious vs. .Mac bookmark syncing
Dave Chartier and I were talking about Del.icio.us earlier today, in the secret TUAW offices in Reese Witherspoon's guest house. He loves Delicious, and I had never used it. For years now, I've been happily chugging along with .Mac's bookmark syncing feature, and my own organization of the bookmark bar. Yet, at Dave's suggestion, I gave Delicious a try. After installing Delibar and exporting my bookmarks with Safarilicious, I was ready to go.
The Delicious Pros
First of all, it's very easy to add a bookmark. Just add the droplet to your menubar and give it a click. Next, the tagging is just great. By adding tags to my bookmarks (like "apple," "blog," "daily" or "family") I can easily find the site (or group of sites) I'm looking for. The social aspect is also very appealing. If I want to find sites that other users have tagged as "apple" or "tech," that's a snap.
Finally, I have access to my bookmarks from any internet enabled computer, on any operating system. You can't beat that. I can even add bookmarks to my collection from any of those random machines. Sounds great, and it is. But I'm not going to use it. Here's why.
The Delicious Cons
This may sound petty, but it's huge to me. No "open in tabs." I keep my bookmarks highly organized, and I have several folders that categorize links into "Daily," "Apple," "WIN," etc. The first thing I do each morning is right-click on the "Daily" folder and select "Open in tabs." I then move from tab to tab, closing ones I'm not interested in and keeping the good ones open for more thorough inspection later. While Delibar allows for greater organization than a plain old browser does, it won't allow for my "open in tabs" routine. Plus, it only lets me open one link at a time, and each in a new window! That is totally unacceptable.
Also, I'm not going to keep a web page open just because it contains my bookmarks. The bookmark bar was invented to extinguish this annoyance. Now, I understand that I can subscribe to Delicious RSS feeds, and that's great, but I really like to have my sites open in a series of tabs. It's just my preferred way to work.
What I Like About .Mac
Well, several of the Delicious pros are a part of .Mac's bookmark sync. I can access my bookmarks from any internet enabled computer by going to bookmarks.mac.com, and I can add a new link to any of the folders I created on my Mac at home from the computer I happen to be using (be it a Mac, a Windows machine or what have you). Aside from the social aspect of Delicious, this is what's most appealing to me. Speaking of social bookmarking...
What .Mac Could Learn from Delicious
No tagging. Once you've created a bunch of tags, you miss them when they're gone. For highly organized neatnicks like me, creating and utilizing tags upon tags is very satisfying. I just don't get that with Safari. Also, the social aspect of Delicious-that is, the ability to browse other people's bookmarks-is way cool and something that would be a great feature of .Mac. I'd love to see this implemented some day.
Conclusion
Delicious is fantastic, but it simply doesn't fit my personal style of working. I'm not knocking it in any way, but I just like to be able to "categorize" sites as either "interesting," "follow-up" or "ditch it" on the fly. Plus, aside from the tagging and sharing, .Mac lets me do what I want to do with my bookmarks: Access and add to them from any computer. For now at least, I'm sticking with .Mac.
