Joshua Schachter, the founder of del.icio.us, talks about being acquired by Yahoo, design minimalism and functionality, Web 2.0, and the evolution of social bookmarking.
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Episode 13: Bookmark This
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Social bookmarking, whereby consumers store and share the sites they visit, has taken off in the past year or so. The best-known of these sites is undoubtedly
del.icio.us, which was acquired in December 2005 by Yahoo. In our latest video in the DevSource Great Minds in Development series, we spoke with the company's founder, Joshua Schachter.
Although you might think this discussion is largely about consumer use of the Internet, much of what Schachter has to say is relevant to Web developers. For example, he discusses the evolution of a "design grammar" where elements repeat across the Web consistently, and the expectations that users have for the way the the moving pieces fit together.
He confides the real reason for del.icio.us's minimalism (his HTML wasn't up to more: "that's all I could do"), and the reason the lack of gingerbread makes sense. It's one thing when you design software to be used all day long, he points out. But if you're building tools used for a few minutes a day, users can't spend time figuring out what things are and how they work; they'll go somewhere else to use their time more profitably.
Del.icio.us was created to serve his own need, initially, but the development process has changed. Because people are now relying on the site for information that's important to them, Schachter says, "It's no longer fair for me to hack on it when I feel like it."
His most fervent advice for developers? "Get to the market." Don't sit around thinking what your app should do, he says; get it written quickly and into users' hands. In the day you have something "out there" for people to use, Schachter says, "You'll learn a hundred times more than you would by thinking about it."
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