Delicious Does Twitter, Sort Of, But It’s Not The Appliance I Dream Of

I read that Yahoo had released a new version of Delicious with a Twitter integration. So I went and fiddled with it. The background: I used Delicious for years, tolerating the stupidity of one-word tags, initially because there wasn’t much else that I liked and partly because there is an automatic ‘daily posting of links to your blog’ option. But months ago I switched to trying linkblogs on Tumblr, a practice that I have discontinued.

Mostly, these days, I simply dream of ‘streammarks’ since I am creating tweets with recommended Bit.ly URLs, and dropping them into the Twitter stream. And seeing dozens (hundreds?) of URLs passing by every day, too.

I was hoping that the Delicious integration with Twitter would do at least some of that. But does it? No.

The screenshot above shows the a bookmark in the Delicious editor. Note that a convention of inserting ‘@twitter’ in the SEND field is used to cause the Link to be posted. Ok, but sort of a contraption. If you put in other @usernames they don’t seem to do anything.

The worst thing about the current approach is the tweet.

First, I can’t pick a different URL shortener. I would rather use Bit.ly, thank you very much, because it offers actual metrics.

Second, it seems obvious that if I haven’t written a description, the tweet text should used as the description, but it doesn’t work that way. And even worse — a real showstopper — the tweet text is not even saved, nor is the short icio.us URL that is generated!

And ten times more important is the fact that this set up runs as an external application dropping one liners into Twitter, while I want an appliance, an application that eavesdrops on my Twitter stream, and creates the bookmarks from the URLs, hashtags, and other microsyntax that I festoon my Twitter stream with. And, just as critical, I want that hypothetical appliance to build bookmarks from all the URLs that others drop into my stream, too.

So this was certainly not the appliance I was hoping for, and its not even an application I want to use.