Delicious – The world’s leading social bookmarking service

Delicious helps you “keep, share and discover the best of the web.”

I use it mainly for the “keep”/”remember” feature. Delicious has been home for my bookmarks since 2009, and though it’s history has been semi-rocky, it remains a valuable option for social (or non-social) bookmarking on the web.

Favorites | Bookmarks | Links

Some of us think of links we save in our web browser as our “Favorites” – a folder in which we place our favorite websites for easy finding and later reference.

Others of us think of such saved links as “Bookmarks”.

If you’re not familiar with either of those, here is a great description:

A bookmark is a marker that identifies a webpage. It provides a way to easily get back to the same website at a later time. You add new bookmarks to your browser’s bookmarks bar.

However you think of them, using the bookmarks (or favorites) feature of your web browser is definitely encouraged.

Where are they stored?

Most of the time these bookmarks are saved locally, within the browser. With the advent of the “cloud”, however, each web browser has a sync option.

Safari and iCloud bookmarks can sync between machines and be available from any device.

If you turn on Bookmarks when you set up iCloud, iCloud stores and pushes the same bookmarks to each of the devices that you set up to work with iCloud, so you can quickly access the same websites from any device.

For example, if you create a bookmark on your iOS device, you see the same bookmark when you open Safari on your Mac or Windows computer.

Firefox users can use Firefox Sync or the faithful Xmarks service.

Google Chrome users can sync their bookmarks via their Google Account when signed in to Chrome.

So why Delicious?

I can think of a few instances in which a third-party, “cloud-bookmarking” service like Delicious can come in handy:

  1. When you’re not on your machine, or don’t have your device, your bookmarks are readily accessible.
  2. When you’d like to further organize and tag your bookmarks for “remembering” and finding later.
  3. Social sharing of helpful links, organized by topic.
  4. Having a record of when you bookmarked what (Delicious keeps a date record of when a link was added by you and who else has bookmarked that link).

So it comes down to it: remember, discover, and share. Add and organize what you find on the web.

Other Options

Although Delicious has been my home for bookmarks over the last few years, it has had it’s share of bumps along the way and other services deserve note. Check out the other options!

Bookmark / Content Collaboration Services

Organizing and Stewarding Knowledge – good luck!