Discovering vs Teaching Del.icio.us: Four Uses

Not long ago someone wrote me and asked, "what's so great about del.icio.us?  It looks great, but I don't quite get it."  It's a good question and one that begs the previous question, why hasn't del.icio.us, a powerful social bookmarking application, and services like it, gone mainstream?

I just discovered a great post from John Udell asking these same questions.  Udell believes, quoting Richard Ziade, that del.icio.us hasn't gone mainstream for one of three reasons:

1. Nobody really needs a way to centrally store their bookmarks
2. Most people don’t understand what del.icio.us does
3. People don’t feel compelled to share del.icio.us with others

I agree with Udell that the answer is almost certainly number two.  People just don't understand what del.icio.us does.  He writes a nice description of his top four uses here.

The title of Udell's post tells you what the article is really about, "Discovering versus teaching principles of social information management."  That's the key to so many Internet technologies.