Delicious | Media Culpa

Delicious auto-saves your links before you hit “Save”

There have been some problems with the new Delicious site after it was relaunched the other week. One thing I discovered today is that when you use the Delicious bookmarklet to save links, it automatically saves all links as soon as you click the bookmarklet, i.e. as soon as the pop-up window opens. Take a look at this short screencast to see how it works.

It shows you my collection of Delicious bookmarks. Then I go to an article that I wish to save on Delicious. I click the “save on delicious” bookmarklet and the pop-up window immediately says that the link is saved. I didn’t click on Save, so the link is saved without tags and in my case automatically tweeted to my 3,000+ followers. As you may see in the video, although the box “this link is private” is ticked, the link is saved as Public.

When you save a link directly on Delicious.com, it is also saved automatically before you hit the Save button (and are able to add tags), but at least there you are able to choose Private mode before it is saved to the site.

I use Delicious every day and for a number of reasons, many of the links that I save are not meant to be public. I hope Delicious/AVOS will fix this problem soon.

How to publish your Delicious links on Twitter

Social bookmarking site Delicious was recently bought by AVOS, a company owned by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. A new version of Delicious was launched a few days ago and it includes a new sleek design and new features such as the ability to create “stacks”, a form of curated bundle of links within any topic.

But other features have either disappeared or requires some tweaking to continue to work (for example, I have not been able to get my iPhone/Safari bookmarklet to work so I am having trouble saving bookmarks on my phone). One feature that I have been using is to publish or share my saved (public) bookmarks on Twitter. I have used Twitterfeed.com and the old RSS feed that I used was this:

http://del.icio.us/rss/kullin

This no longer works so I need to find the updated RSS feed. You can find it under your profile image on your Delicious page.

The new RSS feed is http://del.icio.us/v2/rss/kullin (basically the only difference is the addition of /vs/ ) and yours will look the same, just replace “kullin” with your username.

To publish your links on Twitter, register with Twitterfeed.com and create a new feed. Paste the RSS link and then tick the box for making the feed active (you can do this later if you want to try first).

Then go to advanced settings. There you choose posting frequency, titles etc and you can also add a prefix/suffix to the tweet to explain to your followers that this link is from Delicious. The last step is to choose what networks to publish the feed on, for example Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Connect with your Twitter account and you are done.

New Delicious offers a wide range of RSS feeds and if you want to subscribe to friends, other users, topics or keywords you can create your own tailored feed and then paste it into an RSS reader like Google Reader. These feeds can be found here.

How to backup your Delicious bookmarks and import to Diigo

According to an article on The Next Web, Yahoo might be looking at closing down or possibly transform the social bookmarking service Delicious into some other Yahoo branded product. If you are like me, and have half your online memory archived on Delicious (I have more than 3,000 bookmarks), the thought of losing all those links is not all that attractive. But fear not, it is easy to do a backup and also to import the data into other services.

Backup your Delicious bookmarks
To backup your bookmarks, first log in to your account at Delicious.com. Then go Settings and then Export/Backup Bookmarks. There you can save all your bookmarks as an html file and by clicking the boxes for “include my tags” and “include my notes” you also will save that data. Press “Export” and save the html file to your computer.

Import to Diigo
If you don’t have an account, first join Diigo for free by selecting a username and password. Then (after activating your account via email confirmation) you got to Tools and Import Bookmarks. There, press the icon for Delicious and on the next page you will have two options. Either you select the html file on your computer, that you just saved from Delicious, or you import via API by filling in your Delicious username and password. (I actually did both by mistake, but luckily it didn’t import twice.)

If you have many bookmarks, the import to Diigo will take several hours, but it worked really well. The only thing that I have noticed so far that didn’t work, is that the bookmarks marked “private” in Delicious are not private in Diigo after the import and you will have to change that manually, which of course most people won’t do.

Also, the old tags are imported, but you can’t filter via old tags in the Library, unless you search for it. However, if you add a new item to Diigo with a new tag, it automatically finds your old stuff from Delicious with the same tag.

There are other ways to import your old Delicious bookmarks to other services or browsers, but with Diigo at least now you have a backup plan in case Delicious will disappear.

Top reasons for unfriending on Facebook

Do you post all your Gowalla and Foursquare check-ins to your Facebook profile, as well as your tweets, Delicious bookmarks and TripIt travels? Chances are, you are starting to become as dull as dishwater to your Facebook friends. Sharing is caring, but oversharing might not be the ultimate way to add value to your network. A new study by Christopher Sibona, a PhD student at the University of Colorado at Denver, investigated why people unfriend someone on Facebook. The study, which surveyed some 1,500 Facebook users, found that 57 percent of those surveyed unfriended for online reasons, while 26.9 percent did so for offline behavior.

The number one reason for unfriending someone on Facebook was “frequent, unimportant posts”.

“The 100^th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,” he said.

The second reason was posting about polarizing topics like religion and politics. Third reason for being unfriended was posting inappropriate posts, such as crude or racist comments.

Footnote: Hat tip to @jeanlucr