"Delicious is a social bookmarks manager." Or not. Like many recent, nascent Web-based systems, such as Flickr, Delicious is nifty at first glance but its usefulness has yet to be fully realized.

As social software, Delicious offers a public, collective link-list; a personal link-list; it gives easy access to the personal pages of others, and the means to subscribe to anyone's link-list (thus creating one's own collective link-list consisting exclusively of contributions by selected individuals). Delicious is barely social- there is no communication between users, no matching services, and no way to "get to know" anyone aside from what links they have collected.

As a "bookmarks manager," Delicious offers the ability to add metadata to collected links, such as short and extended descriptions, and "tags"--words used to classify and categorize a link. The tags are displayed on the right side of a link-blog page, with a numeric indicator of how many links include each tag word. Clicking on a tag displays links that contain that tag. Links are also filed chronologically, and an archive of each day can be accessed. Between a time-based lookup and tag-based lookup, there is some organization here, but I'd hardly call it "management," particularly when compared to how traditional Favorites/Bookmarks are managed.

Delicious isn't social software, it's a blindly inclusive, collective publishing system. It's not a bookmark manager because it lacks some fundamental tools, most notably the ability to arrange tags (categories) into a nested format, and the dependency on time--it's not necessarily useful to know which days links were filed on. What if I'd rather list links in alphabetical order?

So what is Delicious, and what use is it? I believe Delicious is best described as a collective "link-blog" system. Delicious may be an abbreviated blog, in the sense that its content is comprised primarily of URLs, but there is room for personal commentary if contributors wanted to add some to their filed links. In its current state, visiting Delicious' main page is the information equivalent of a shotgun blast to the face--some pellets will stick, some won't, some will only scrape the surface, and others will go right into your brain. It's mostly unfiltered, and seems to be treading into overkill territory--although popular links are highlighted, and recently added URLs are filed at the top (each time a new user files it in their own collection) Delicious may soon need some form of "threshold" whereby unpopular links are not immediately seen.

The spectre of popularity contests and gaming the system looms large. Frankly, it'd be all too easy to pollute the current Delicious by falsifying the popularity of certain URLs--all one would have to do is set up a number of dummy Delicious accounts and then add a particular link to each account's collection--suddenly your page goes up from one link to twenty, all the while being bumped to the top of the page whenever it's copied to a new collection. Another use is to turn Delicious into a mirror of one's own blog, guaranteeing frequent exposure on the site as well as the likelihood of generating more traffic. All one would have to do (and it's probably been done already) is create a widget that posts to Delicious every time a weblog entry is posted--so you'd post in your main blog as always, but then the entry is mirrored on Delicious. But who wants to read your crappy blog postings on Delicious? Imagine if a thousand people were doing this every day--utter trash on the main page every minute of the day.

What Delicious needs is not only some clear direction as far as what it will or could become, but a fulfillment of its purported "social" and "management" aspects. And the biggest part of management, given the signal-to-noise ratio, is the addition of many more filtering features.