What is del.icio.us ?

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. del.icio.us users save, organize, and share their favorite web links with del.icio.us. It is a webservice which allows users to access , modify and present data in a way they deem fit. The “open source” concept applied to data is del.icio.us. Google maps is a good example . Google allows other applications to access thier map data for internal use.

How does del.icio.us work ?

It uses Tags. Tags are like metadata. Tags are special keywords you can assign to each bookmark. del.icio.us allows users to post bookmarks with Tags to thier interface. To access a bookmark stored under a particular tag is just type

http://del.icio.us/YOURNAME/comcast

There are many ways to post bookmarks .A bookmarklet which looks like a web browser bookmark or favorite enables you to execute JavaScript commands in your browser.Remember when you post bookmarks everyone can see it . A concept called private bookmarks is available but there is no implementation as of now. Every tag has a RSS feed which can be consumed by feed readers .

There are ways to interact with the del.icio.us API through almost any kind of modern programming language or method that you can think of, including C++, Macromedia Flash, Java, ASP.NET, and so on. REST (Representational State Transfer) is the underlying protocol beneath the API.Rest always lists resources not operations and it  uses the WWW-Authenticate header for security.