Why hasn't del.icio.us taken off? Jon Udell has a post contemplating why the del.icio.us social bookmarking service hasn't seen a wider adoption. He contends that the main problem is that people don't understand what del.icio.us is and how they can benefit from using it. While I agree that this is a problem, I think you also need to take into account that the retrieval functions in delicious..........are............incred........ibly.........slow.

I consider myself to be a moderate del.icio.us user, using it primarily as a place to dump URLs that I think I may need access to in the future. I've tried to tie to more closely to my work, but the poor performance of the search and retrieval functions always hold me back. For me, del.icio.us is to a large extent a write-only tool.

For example, I just tried to search my bookmarks for "km." First, I had to switch the search context from everyone's bookmarks to my bookmarks, the first clue that the system is not geared toward my own personal use. Next, I type in km and hit search. I have 124 items tagged with "km", and I expect to be able to pull them up quickly, and definitely faster then if I manually browse my tags (or, as I often do, on my del.icio.us home page, hit ctrl+f to bring up the browser's find, search for "km", next, next, next, and hit enter when I get to the tag I want). So I click "search", and wait for 30 seconds until the following is displayed:

I just reran the search, and it worked, but took about 60 seconds to respond. The same search on Google is, of course, instantaneous.

Poor retrieval performance is not going to stop someone from trying del.icio.us, although a few people may be put off if they hear users (like me) complaining about the fact that it is dog-slow. I am sure, though, that there are more then a few people that tried it and gave up because of the slow speed. I don't think del.icio.us will ever be more then a niche application unless they can address this speed issue.

A huge threat for them, I think, will be the Places functionality coming in Firefox 3. Done correctly, Places will provide a much better way to store and retrieve personal bookmarks. I don't think that Places has any social aspects to it, but my guess is that someone will come along that will allow you to automagically submit URLs to del.icio.us as you bookmark them in Firefox/Places. However, I think that Jon is correct in that most people don't understand or agree on the benefits of social bookmarking. If Places helps them address their personal information management problems, they might not bother with del.icio.us at all.

(BTW, I ended up uninstalling the new del.icio.us plugin for Firefox on my work machine. No matter what I did, it appears to cause a performance hit almost every time I loaded a web page. I reverted back to the original extension which simply makes it easier to add items to del.icio.us.)