YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site

(1) My first concern is about privacy. The idea that my search results would be curated based on my friends' browsing activity makes me anxious. Does the site link specific search results to individual friends? I expect that kind of public accountability would be inhibiting, making users feel pressured to conduct their searches and browsing much more carefully than they otherwise would, choosing only the most reputable sites and restricting the breadth of their search terms--as if someone was standing behind them scrutinizing every click and search. If Google auto-complete was only populated with search terms conducted in my social network, that would tell me a lot of very personal information about people. Even if you don't link friends to specific searches or sites, I think in many cases it would be easily identifiable, and could have pernicious social effects. Who wants to conduct a search about, say, a personal health matter, if it will fuel gossip among and invite ridicule from their friends? I think I'd end up using the site to search really erudite topics to impress my friends, and leave my personal/dumb searches (i.e., the dumb questions that makes the internet so useful!) to another search engine.

(2) Setting aside the privacy concern, I'm not convinced that the product itself--search results curated by my friends' searches--actually offers that much value to me. I like my friends but I don't consider them experts on many topics; and if they are experts on a topic, then (1) I'd probably ask them my question directly rather than searching about it; and/or (2) their internet searching about it is probably at a more technical level than the information I'm searching for.

(3) With that being said, I do think the idea behind the product--to curate search results based on the searches of actual experts--is a really good idea. While I wouldn't rely on my friends' opinions on, say, the best cardiologist in the city, or upholstery techniques, or Ukranian politics, I would greatly appreciate having my search results shaped by the opinions of actual experts on those topics. I'd appreciate a search engine that curated search results based on klout scores that accounts for how well-respected those sites are by people on the whole, and by experts in that area.

(4) To the extent that the site allows annotation on webpages (eg, highlighting to create a discussion, or adding comments on particular passages or pictures, etc.) I think that is an exceptional, disruptive idea that could really change the way people interact with content. But why limit those comments to just your immediate network? I don't always care what my friends think about a topic they know little about, but I'd care very much to see, e.g., what passages Bill Gates is highlighting in XYZ article about international development.

Anyway, those are just my initial perceptions. I'd be happy to chat more via email if you want me to elaborate.

For us - and I know for some other folk I've talked to about exactly this topic - things like delicious and pinboard are really important services. I've done a little bit of custdev around this since a "better pinboard/delicious" for my particular use case is something I'm interested in.

I may be atypical. I may not be part of a large enough market for a real business to be built around (only done a little bit of custdev ;-). I've no idea.

But I do know there are people willing to pay at least that much on a monthly basis. Coz I've got a smallish mailing list of 'em ;-)

I remember showing the original del.icio.us to my friends and them all saying "I don't get it." And then I said "instead of emailing everybody links, you can just post them here and we'll all get them automatically" and they went "Ah! Now I get it!"