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The del.icio.us service is something I've been aware of for a while now, but hadn't really quite gotten. For the (probably few) people who don't already know, del.icio.us is a website that allows you to post favourite links to a central service and share them with everyone else.
So far, so... so what? All very nice, but why bother?
But now I have Seen The Light. What had previously seemed not all that useful I've come to believe I'll use practically every day. So why the change of heart?
Well, a couple of reasons, to be honest. First and foremost is (straightforwardly enough) the use of bookmarklets to do the posting. I'm on a page I want to bookmark, I click a link... et voila - it's posted to my list. This means I can bookmark interesting things at home/ work and access them at work/home. Or from anywhere, for that matter. Also, because it's "social", you can see what other people are bookmarking too. And because they can be categorised easily (something I've not yet done with mine, although I keep meaning to), you can see very easily what else has gone into the 'group' category (or your own - it's all very easy and simple).
But that's not the best bit. It comes with an API that allows external programs to access it. There's no reason why (ultimately) browsers couldn't use the service directly for bookmark management. Once upon a time, I partially wrote a bookmark synchronisation system that'd allow me to share what I bookmarked between every browser I used, be it on Windows or Linux. Unfortunately, I never finished it properly as I ended up using Linux (and Mozilla) almost exclusively - synchronising bookmarks was as simple as a cronjob that rsynced the bookmarks.html file.
Today though, my needs aren't quite that simple. I now use Macs at home, and that means I could be running Safari, Mozilla or even (blurgh) IE. I'd have to write something that synchronised between all those if I wanted to do things properly. Far too much like hard work, I'm sure you'd agree.
So I use del.icio.us as a link dump, one that I can share between every browser I use, on any platform, no matter where I happen to be. It's ace. But now back to that API.
[An aside here for non-techies - API stands for "Application Program(ming ) Interface". It means that you can access and manipulate another program's capabilities/data in a standard way.]
The API allows full access to a del.icio.us user's bookmarks - reading, writing, editing - the works. So a series of programs, using this API have begun to spring up. On the Mac, this means cocoal.icio.us, which gives you the ability to manage your bookmarks from within the confines of a native OS X application. It's handier than it sounds, honest!
Anyway. Enough of my raving, try it out for yourself! The service is free, and it takes all of 30 seconds to register. And if you're really interested, you can see what I've bookmarked here. (I'll be replacing my "Out of Interest" section with my del.icio.us links just as soon as I get around to it - probably sometime next year at the rate I'm currently going ;-) )