Joshua Schacter – del.icio.us: what we’ve learned

Posted on February 8, 2006 by Tim
  • Browser inconsistencies
  • Scaling – SQL isn’t great under heavy load
  • Think beyond one web server, one db server
  • Abuse
  • “Idiots are a lot smarter than you”
  • Wait to see what breaks before you fix it
  • Apache
    • Know it inside out
    • Put a proxy in front that isn’t apache – helm? – to add throttling etc etc
    • Images on a separate server
    • RSS on a separate server
    • Use throttling – mod_throttle doesn’t work very well…
  • APIs
    • Built in from the start, because the developer needed it
    • Greatly encourages adoption
    • No lock-in – the user owns their data
    • No API key in del.icio.us – low barrier to entry
    • Hundreds of plugins have been created
    • Identifiers
    • Don’t expose the internal ID, especially if computer generated, or people will try and programmatically hammer & scrape the service.
  • Features
    • Don’t add features that exist elsewhere – e.g. messaging
    • Build features that people will actually use, not what they ask for (what they need, not what they want)
  • RSS
    • important – the native way to describe a list of links
    • put them everywhere you possibly can – (msk note: PWA needs RSS!)
    • Understand caching & headers, the “if not modified” header
    • del.icio.us has more RSS traffic than HTML & API traffic, due to poorly-written RSS readers…
  • URLs
    • make ‘em simple
    • hide your implementation
    • design them for the user, not the developer
  • Surprises – expect them
  • Passion
    • del.icio.us started from a text file of links – 25,000 entries
    • next step – a single-user db-backed system
    • then thought “maybe other people would like to use it too…” del.icio.us was born
    • don’t go looking for problems to solve – solve your own problems that you’re passionate about
  • Release
    • Don’t go closed beta, be open!
    • Get passionate users using your app quicker
  • Attention
    • “The daily popular”
    • Aggregation of attention works for small groups
    • Less useful when the population of the app grows larger
    • But…you can aggregate by tag
  • Spam
    • “attention theft”
    • “social software is that which gets spammed”
    • No top 10 on del.icio.us – not very interesting
    • If it were there, it would be a spam-magnet, people trying to get to the top of the list
    • Don’t provide feedback – let them think things are still working. No error messages to give the a clue that they’ve been rumbled.
  • Tags
    • It’s not about organisation, but about UI and recall by the user
    • Not all metadata is tags
    • There’s a bit of difficulty involved in adding a URL to del.icio.us, but not too much. Don’t make it too easy, nor too hard.
    • Beware librarians! Don’t try to impose a vocabulary/taxonomy.
  • Motivation
    • Make it useful for the user in itself
    • Make it so the users want to bring other users into the system – evangelism ;)
  • Effort
    • Don’t spend time building features that no-one will use!
  • Measurement
    • “Intuition is guesswork backed by numbers”
    • Measure the system itself
    • Measure behaviour rather than claims
  • Testing
    • User-acceptance testing
    • Test that it matches the users
    • Don’t assign people goals and make people do them
  • Language
    • Speak the user’s language
    • Bookmarks only make sense to Netscape/Firefox users – IE users speak “favorites”
  • Registration
    • Make as much functionality available without registration as possible
    • People are wary of spam & marketing
    • Short and sweet reg, then send back to whence they came…
  • Design grammar
    • emulate the structure of the web world out there – don’t deviate from established conventions too much
  • Morals
    • How users are treated
    • It’s users’ data, not yours
    • Many systems don’t allow account deletion – it’s good to allow people to jump ship if they want to.
    • Deleted data should be really deleted
  • Infection
    • zero-dollar promotion
    • totally word-of-mouth
    • RSS important
    • E-mail not so much – you don’t want to be seen as a spammer
    • “viral vectors” – umm? RSS, iCal etc etc? Bzzt.
  • Communities
    • There’s no community in del.icio.us in the traditional sense
    • Saves having flamewars etc.
    • Enable communities to use your system without providing an actual community
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