Library clips

Send a bookmark to another del.icio.us user.

From the del.icio.us blog:

“We’ve just begun rolling out support for tagging items for others. To do so, use “for:username” where username is the name of the user you want to send the item to.

You can see items tagged for you at http://del.icio.us/for/ (it’ll redirect to your own page, which other users will not be able to see.)”

You have to be logged into to see your “for account”, which means you can’t see other peoples “for account”, unlike being able to see their bookmarks (which is read-only unless you are logged in).

Anyway the other feature is that you get a private RSS feed of your “for account”, whack that in your RSS reader and wait for annotated pre-tagged gifts from your loved ones.

Now, I assume, if you gave someone your private RSS feed, they could also see your “for account”, so it’s only as private as you keep it.

More…

When I bookmarked a page I made one of the tags to myself “for:johnt”, when I went to my “for account” there it was along with the other tags.

Now if I go back to my del.icio.us account and delete the “for:johnt” tag from the bookmark, and then go to my “for account”, the bookmark has disappeared.

This is unfortunate as when I send people bookmarks I’ll accumulate all these tags I don’t want, but I can’t delete them otherwise the bookmarks will disappear from their “for account”…actually I don’t if this is happening because I’m sending them to myself, and not to others, so maybe this problem really doesn’t exist.

Maybe I could make a tag bundle and keep all the tags from bookmarks I send to people under a heading like “for”, and then click the little down arrow to hide all the tags.

Now if someone receives a bookmark from you and then deletes it, will the tag disappear from your (the senders) del.icio.us account (as long they have no other bookmarks from you they haven’t deleted yet)?

I think the “inbox” account could be called “monitor” or “track”, the “for” account could be called “inbox”, and the bookmarks you send (eg. for:johnt) to people could go in your “sent box”, and the “bookmarks” account (your personal del.icio.us homepage), well that can stay as “bookmarks”.

So I’m wondering if someone sends me a bookmark then how do I transfer it into my account…I don’t see a link that says copy this item (like on all the bookmarks on the del.icio.us homepage).

Another idea is to make a link along the top of your account next to inbox, labelled “for”.

I just hope people don’t harvest del.icio.us user names and spam away.

Insight

I just had a thought, if you use Pasta combined with “del.icio.us for”, you can send your friends private messages (I suppose you can do that in the comments anyway), but if you use Pasta you don’t need a link, the bookmark link is the message itself…using wetaste is kind of similar.

So how is the essential idea of using Pasta with the del.icio.us for account, or even the usual way different than using Tagsurf.
The only difference I see is that in Tagsurf all your bookmarks have permalinks, and also reply and thread.

I’ve just started experimenting with Tagsurf, and other that I’ve mentioned above, I don’t know how really different it is to del.icio.us…although it’s early days so I need to play with it more, but I sure am finding it difficult to understand.

Tagsurf seems like you are part of a forum, but you have your own blog like authoring section (your own soap box, which makes it different to other forums, bedsides the tagging feature of course)

…so it’s like a community blog system, where all the blogs or accounts are generic, with features of a forum, and a folksonomy…is this possible!

Now in Connotea or Shadows you can see a thread of comments around a bookmark (URL), but in Tagsurf the thread is around someones post (URL), this makes Tagsurf unique

…but when you combine “del.icio.us for” and pasta, and the comments threading feature of Connotea or Shadows, you will have a similar tool to Tagsurf.

Now I’ve lost myself here…I don’t know if this makes sense, but I’ll leave it at that!

[ADDED 16/07/05: You could also use Webnote for RSS conversations].