I’m picking this up very late (I’ll plead overwork and travel as my excuse), but I love the for: function in del.icio.us (which can now be gotten to via the simpler www.delicious.com, incidentally). I’d chatted with Josh about this a while back, but had pretty much forgotten about it until Jon Udell mentioned it. Here’s what he had to say:
Kudos to Alex Bosworth for figuring out a clever way to save bookmarks semi-privately in del.icio.us. It took me a moment to sort out how this works because it depends on a feature I didn’t know del.icio.us had: the ability to tag an item for a friend. I could find no documentation on this, but eventually guessed correctly that if I want to tag this page for Stephen O’Grady, I can use the tag for:sogrady. Now it’s listed at del.icio.us/for/sogrady, but only Stephen can view that page.
I can verify that the functionality does indeed work as promised, and the bookmark was indeed brought to my attention. My colleague’s begun using this functionality as well.
If you a.) know that I read your blog, and b.) integrate your del.icio.us feed into your main feed, the value here is lessened; yes, there’s the private angle but they’re only semi-private anyway. But for anyone trying to get my attention, this is a great way to do it. To take advantage, I’ve incorporated the private RSS feed for the for:sogrady tag into my subscriptions over at FeedLounge, so if you’ve got something to direct to me feel free to use it (instead of email, please ;). Like Jon, I hope it doesn’t get spammed, but I’m not worried about that just yet.
The interesting thing here is that I’m having a lot of conversations with traditional collaboration providers – from messaging to portals – and have been trying to educate them on the advantages of these sorts of lightweight (and free) collaborative tools. Put another way, the del.icio.us for functionality won’t succeed because it has every collaboration feature under the sun; it will succeed because it’s easy and is a natural part of the workflow for any del.icio.us user. There’s a lesson in there for traditional vendors, if they choose to draw it out.
