Scrumptious
My last post about Matt Biddulph’s demo, which shows del.icio.us functionality layered on another website, inspired me to produce a quick-and-dirty prototype in the form of a sidebar for Mozilla browsers. Seeing as this is the first thing I’ve ever written using XUL+Javascript (the standard Mozilla development tools), it didn’t turn out to be as quick as I had anticipated. But rest assured, it’s plenty dirty! 
(I’ve only tested it with Firefox 1.0 so I can’t guarantee that it will work with other browsers and versions.)
Open it by choosing View -> Sidebar -> Scrumptious (or press Alt-S). Click on the “Load Tags” button to see all the popular tags for the page currently visible in the browser. This is already pretty cool, but that’s not all! By double-clicking on a tag, you can see all of the popular websites that have been bookmarked with that tag (if any). And if you want to create a bookmark for the current page, or add a new tag to your existing bookmark, just right-click on the tag and choose “Add Tag” in the popup menu. Your del.icio.us bookmarks will be updated accordingly.
I didn’t follow the template of Biddulf’s demo exactly because the del.icio.us API doesn’t let you retrieve bookmarks for an entire website, just for a single webpage. But I think that the list of overall most popular websites for a tag is also a good indication of what the tag is being used for, and so the data presented by the sidebar should be of use in selecting tags for a page. Obviously showing what tags other people are using is a big help, and likely (for better or worse) to accentuate the general power-law nature of a site like del.icio.us, since the impetus to use already popular tags becomes even stronger.
I have a bunch of comments to make based on my experience writing this sidebar. Let me first of all thank Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us, for the great job he did, particularly in providing an open API so that extensions like this are possible. Also, I used the existing Mozilla del.icio.us sidebar as my starting point and viciously gutted it, which was of invaluable assistance to me as a XUL newbie. So thanks to the whole team who produced that sidebar and especially to Christian Hellsten, who seems to have written most of the code. In fact, I used the same preference settings for Scrumptious that they use for their sidebar, so if you are using the latter already you won’t have to reenter your del.icio.us account information.
(The rest of this post is pretty technical so stop reading and go play with Scrumptious if you don’t like TLAs.)
The most obvious thing illustrated by this sidebar is the power of web APIs to enable existing applications to spawn a rich ecosystem of extensions. Certainly this is the case with del.icio.us. I found a whole page of related applications while surfing around with Scrumptious.
A more subtle observation is the dissonance between open APIs and the web’s client/server model. An application using an API can hammer on a website far more effectively than a mere mortal surfing in a web browser. In fact, the original Scrumptious (which I completed a couple of days ago) had a more dynamic user interface which automatically displayed all the tags and popular URLs for any pages you landed on, without you having to explicitly ask it to. But Joshua was understandably concerned about the load this might produce, so I modified it to be more parsimonious with its API requests. This is the same problem that Wikipedia is experiencing: it’s much easier for a community of users to create tons of content than for them to serve it up afterwards. I’ve already argued that Wikipedia would benefit hugely from a P2P architecture, and this is perhaps even more true of del.icio.us. But I’ll leave that for another post.
One final point was the evolution of my attitude towards RDF, which I would now describe as a love/hate relationship. This a marked improvement over my previous hate/hate relationship. After playing with Mozilla’s RDF support, I can appreciate the power and robustness of the RDF model. RDF syntax and Mozilla’s RDF API, however, are pretty horrific. It would be great to have the RDF model with a more usable API layered on top (like the one we use for managing resources in AllPeers).
Overall, a very educational experience for me. I hope others will enjoy playing with it as much as I do. Bon appetit!
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