OK, looks like I spoke a little bit soon… while de.lirio.us seemed like a good choice at the moment, there are a crapload of social bookmarking services to choose from! Barry’s paradox of choice strikes again :-/ Wikipedia links to a review of 19 bookmarking services, which can help you decide what to go with.
I’m setting an ideological filter and only considering open source options. I am also requiring the private bookmarks function, otherwise there’s no point in switching away from de.lirio.us. What does that leave me with? Scuttle, unalog, and Connotea (and of course de.lirio.us). That’s still too many options. Let’s consider which one makes it the easiest to import my bookmarks from del.icio.us. According to the chart, only Scuttle offers this feature. Sold! As soon as del.icio.us gets back up, I’m going to try using Scuttle’s web interface to import my bookmarks. As a bonus, it has a “friends list”-privacy feature, like Livejournal or Flickr, and it has… wait for it… comma-separated tags! That is one of the “features” of del.icio.us that I hate the most, the fact that you can’t have tags made from multiple words unless you mash them together somehow, tags are space-separated. Scuttle is just oh so superior, to both del.icio.us and de.lirio.us. Check out my Scuttle page.
If you’re worried that none of these webservices are trustworthy, I suggest you try Foxylicious, a Firefox extension that lets you back up your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser. In fact, although this extension makes it easier to leave del.icio.us for another site, it also makes a compelling case for staying with del.icio.us. … No, no looking back! I am departing del.icio.us for the world of open source and privacy, and that’s final.
UPDATE: OK, not everything on Scuttle seems to work quite as reliably as one would hope, most notably my personal RSS feed. This is annoying, but I guess I’ll report the bug and hope someone fixes it. Personally, this experience is becoming a confirmation of Barry Schwartz’s theories. Choice is evil! It makes us unhappy with our current lot in life! Or something…
UPDATE to the UPDATE: I reported the bug on their Sourceforge project forum, and it was instantaneously fixed. Scuttle has a friendly, responsive developer community, which is always a joy to have with an open source project. It gives me the warm fuzzies and makes me want to stick around.
UPDATE^3: The del.icio.us transfer went perfectly! It even turned all the stupid underscores in my del.icio.us tags into spaces, which looks a lot nicer. I’m falling in love all over again.
There is the question of the network effects: how much does it matter to you to be on the same service as others? How convenient is it? (Well what do you know, you’re on Livejournal!) In truth, I mainly use del.icio.us as a personal indexing of stuff I like tags, so I can quickly re-find “that thing on the internet”. The social-ness isn’t as important, although it’s nice to tag things “for:skyfaller” and such, for the few people who pay attention.
The outage isn’t bothering me so much, in truth, because it’s not mission critical to my work. So are you really, finally, using Scuttle? I just want to know which service I should be subscribing to your feeds under.
Erm, maybe you should wait until Del.icio.us gets back up, so I can see how the transfer process goes. If it doesn’t transfer my bookmarks properly, that may be a problem.
Connotea
Just to let you know, Connotea does offer private bookmarks (http://www.connotea.org/faq#privacy) and space-separated tags (e.g., tag something “social bookmarking”). But it doesn’t allow imports from del.icio.us (yet), so not so good for you right now.