Archive for January, 2006

How To: Quickly Suggest Websites to Friends

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 Michael Barr

A friend of mine recently asked me if I knew of a way to quickly forward web pages of interest to friends and coworkers. This guy and I have been sending short e-mails with such links for more than a decade. So my first response was: What’s so hard about writing an e-mail? But then I got to thinking about how RSS might be used to forward such links around the web more easily.

After some digging and asking around, I learned this is a way to do this if all of the interested parties are del.icio.us users. Here’s how:

Step 1. Each of you should create a free account at http://del.icio.us For example, I’m known there as “frappucino”.

Step 2. Learn how to keep your bookmarks on del.icio.us and tag webpages you might want to visit again. There are several advantages of using del.icio.us for this purpose, not the least of which is you can access your bookmarks from anywhere in the world. I’ve even gone so far as to make my del.icio.us page the home page in all of my web browsers.

Step 3. There are two available methods for quickly sharing bookmarks through your social network:

  • The first method uses the special “for:” tag and operates via push; that is the sender of the link gives it a shove in your direction by tagging that page “for: username” (e.g., “for: frappucino” would recommend the page to me).
  • The second method requires the receiver to sign up to subscribe to one or more tags you use. They do this in their “inbox.” For example, I’ve chosen to subscribe to pages tagged “vc” by a friend of mine I know follows the venture capital community closely.

Here’s more info about this and other things del.icio.us. Note that friends or colleagues who don’t want to create their own del.icio.us account could simply subscribe to your del.icio.us feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/username via their favorite RSS reader.