When you write software, you often find that the features that are hits among your users aren’t the ones you anticipated. In this case, I doubt that the “…and N other people” label was considered a core feature by Joshua when he first created the system, but it’s turned out to be one of the most valuable services that del.icio.us offers. I’m not sure that the “needless clutter” perception is that widespread, at least from the posts on the delicious-discuss list. There seems to be two sorts of people posting: a) people who have embraced the challenge of finding a cool graphical presentation (without any judgement about whether the current approach is really flawed) and b) those who would really prefer to keep the exact count.

I’m pretty sure this is why it’s proving so hard to find even a promising start for a new bargraph-based approach. The ability to scan down a page and see all the bookmarks counts, without having to mouse over each one, has become much more of a core feature than one might have expected at the outset.