Little Disappointed About Del.icio.us Acquisition

Let me preface this by saying that I’m really glad for del.icio.us and its prior financiers. Let me also preface this post by saying that this post only reflects my initial reaction to the recent acquisition and has nothing to do with Yahoo specifically acquiring del.icio.us.

I think social bookmarking tools are a great innovation. But I think that tools like del.icio.us could have gone further in terms of becoming a productivity tool for corporate users.

I am one of the biggest fans of Post It Notes. I tag everything with them … reports I need to read, sections that my collegues need to read on a printed emails, key pages in journals, magazines, Powerpoint presentations, etc.

Del.icio.us, or perhaps another bookmarking service, could have become (in my wildest dreams) the Post It Note of mixed media, not just traditional Internet stuff. Would have been nice for me to have such technlology cut across the internet, intranet-only enterprise content management systems, and email and files on computer systems. In the early 90s, Apple computer used to have a way to highlight certain files with a special color (e.g., red). Such a feature enabled users like myself to create ad-hoc priority or classification schemes for files. That feature wasn’t the same as what del.icio.us currently is, but we don’t have that old Apple feature anymore with Windows. How are we supposed to tag and bookmark files these days?

Day-to-day work in a business often cuts across multiple technologies, and I have found that bookmarks are a good way to put briefing packages together (while attaching notes). Briefing packages might be customer prospect research, competitive intelligence, market studies, or ad-hoc technology primer packages. I’ve used Web 2.0 technology to accomplish these tasks productively in a business environment, and given the right technology I probably would pay for this as I pay for Post It Notes in the physical world. Of course, it would be best if a given technology was ubiquitous across user bases.

Now del.icio.us was probably never targeted for the corporate user as its primary target. All said, when innovative companies like del.icio.us are swooped up, I often wonder whether the essence of the innovations will ever hit mainstream use in corporations.

Update (12/21/05): Ed Sim posts about the web as a platform in the enterprise. This is exactly the productivity kind of stuff I am talking about in this post and that I allude to in my other post. Productivity in the enterprise using web 2.0 stuff is a largely untapped area.