Delishless

Have you any idea what this is?

Ahh, the problem with names. You need to be memorable, you need to evoke the right feeling in your target audience. And (here's the rub) if you make any grandiose claims in your name, you'd better live up to them.

A few years back, Mitsubishi released the "Carisma", a car whose own charisma was notable only for its complete absence. Perhaps the idea was that the name would add a bit of personality to a design otherwise so bland it would make beans on toast look like a dinner party triumph.

If so, the ploy failed. It just served to highlight the ultra-blandness of this very average family car. Yes, you have to be careful with names. Which brings me to Delicious. A bookmarking service that allows you to keep your favourites online, accessible from any browser on internet-connected device. It's a great idea, and one I am all in favour of.

But sadly, my experience of using the service didn't excite my palate - in my view, this isn't a gourmet masterpiece - it's more like the half-arsed Come Dine With Me main course served up by the one with the big mouth and no talent for cooking.

What Is It? What Does It Do?

In all the other resources I've looked at for 23 Things, there's been a very clearly signposted set of pages and/or videos that told you what the service does, and got you started with using it. Just look at the introductory videos for Twitter for an excellent example of how to do this.

Delicious? Nothing. The help information is great if you already know what you're doing, and just want to be reminded of how to do it - but if you're a complete beginner, there's nothing that I could see that led you step-by-step through what to do.

Where Are My Links?

So I managed to drag the button onto my Chrome toolbar so that I could add a few bookmarks. I added a few links. I then went back and tried to visit a couple of pages that I'd bookmarked.

...

[Some time later]

...

It turns out that I need to click on the "Remember" menu. Which is odd, because that sounds like it's the place to go to get Delicious to remember a web page, not for me to visit a page I've bookmarked. In the Eurovision Labelling Contest, Delicious scores "nil points".

Editing Troubles

I went back to it this morning and added a few more bookmarks. I tried bookmarking the Uni's web Outlook site. This has a very simple base URL: www.outlook.soton.ac.uk - but if you go there you'll notice that your browser displays a far more complex URL, with lots of session information embedded in it.

No problem - I'll just bookmark it and then edit out the session info later.

Except that when I went to edit the bookmark in Delicious I could edit everything except the URL itself. Now maybe I could do some further searching for how to edit the URLs of Delicious bookmarks, and it could turn out that it can be done... but quite frankly, I can't be bothered.

Bring on Duncan Ballantyne:

"Delicious: Your help information isn't very helpful to newbies, editing links is more awkward and time consuming than in any browser - in short, you don't live up to your name. And that is why I'm out."