Getting it Right (or Wrong, at Blink)

An interesting post-failure analysis of why social bookmarking site Blink failed while del.ico.us has succeeded. Ari blames product design, although in the comments some people blame the development decisions, the growth of the company, the loss of focus, the ad and registration burdens... in short, all the dot com era fools are to blame.

The worst decisions seem to have been using folders, leading to an insupportable number of performance and downstream design problems impacting user experience; and then the decision to make folders of links private by default instead of public. I think tagging is prone to issues similar to folder creation, but the immediate visibility of content on del.ico.us, instead of just the containers, makes the design work better. There's a real immediate payoff without a lot of digging when you look around on del.ico.us.

My links are public, if you want to browse them. See sidebar.