Social bookmarking sites are only as good as its audience

[cheeni]

I had a 'geek pride' moment in the office today - a co-worker came up to me with his cool-internet-discovery-of-the-day StumbleUpon.com

I immediately pointed him to Reddit, del.icio.us and Digg. I also delivered an impromptu lecture on how these social bookmarks operated and why he'd want to choose one over the other based on the audience each catered to.

del.icio.us was launched IIRC in 2003, and has an early adopter geek crowd. If you are a geek, this is where you'd want to be.

StumbleUpon is more suitable to the here-is-the-latest-time-wasting-email-forward, aka MySpace crowd.

Here, let's try an experiment.

The tag 'internet' on del.icio.us throws up a couple of links on net neutrality, at least three on DNS, a few opinion pieces on the politics and social-psychology of the Internet.

As opposed to StumbleUpon that has in the first five links three links to Youtubesque videos on funny-man-eats-dog / LOL style stories , one link to a flash game and one news clip on the cracked Skype protocol.

I was amazed my co-worker listened through it all even though I knew he was going to stick with StumbleUpon.

karbak and I were early users of del.icio.us and we once actually discussed the horrible consequences of del.icio.us being over run by uncool people when the word got out. So we decided to 'friend' as many cool people as we could on del.icio.us before it became too difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thankfully it hasn't happened as much - of course you have more generic geek interest items on the site today, but the here's-a-cool-flash-game crowd went to sites like Stumbleupon that are even designed differently¹.

Maybe that's something to keep in mind for all budding usability / UI designers. Know your audience. I wonder if someone will do cool research on designing interfaces for geeks.

¹ Even the url structure is different. In del.icio.us it is "del.icio.us/popular/internet" and on SU it is "buzz.stumbleupon.com/internet/"! Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! That's the sound that a bee makes.

Comments

del.icio.us Firefox plugin

[karbak.livejournal.com]

karbak and I were early users of del.icio.us and we once actually discussed the horrible consequences of del.icio.us being over run by uncool people when the word got out.

I still use del.icio.us on an almost daily basis, but have long given up tracking other people's bookmarks. Firefox's del.icio.us plugin is far and away the most useful plugin I've seen for the browser.