del.ico.us, Blink, and smart thinking

Ari Paparo, the creator of a website tagging solution called blink.com (1999) shares his thoughts on how del.ico.us succeeded where Blink did not.  It's insightful.

Tagging (simply stated) is a new website surfing technology focused around communities of individuals sharing bookmarks. I'll add a 'brief overview' on it soon...

When I was with a startup called CampusEngine I met with Backflip, a competitor of Blink. We developed a publishing technology for college newspapers (and gave it away for free. Don't ask) and were interested in integrating anything that would bring and keep students online. After a meet-and-greet and demo I liked the tool. Simply put, it helped you organize (tag) information on the web. As it relates to networks of people sharing their opinions and ideas however, I remember backflip as something I would use as an individual, not necessarily share with friends and colleagues.

This is not to say there wasn't a social or sharing component to Backflip, but the pitch didn't draw my attention to that aspect. I probably would have responded to a "social glue" message; my job was building social networks of students on college campuses around the online campus newspaper. Students like ‘social’ almost as much as (ahem) ‘sharing,’ and I was after pageviews, so that would have been a fit. Perhaps Backflip was guessing (or getting feedback from the market) that the most valuable aspect of their tool was personal organization. Great people at Backflip, by the way.

Comments

[Corey]

Ha ha...I chuckled when I read this:
"We developed a publishing technology for college newspapers (and gave it away for free. Don't ask)"

--A former CE'er