In last night’s post about Wantz.it I posed a rhetorical question about other ways that you could use del.icio.us and the tagging system in other web (or not) applications. Initially I posted a couple of horrible examples, I have since removed the stupid ones. After some further thought today I have come up with some better examples.
1. Automate submissions to sites like Digg or DotNetKicks: members of the site (who’ve added their del.icio.us account name to their profile) bookmark links in del.icio.us with a special tag, like “dotnetkickit”. DotNetKicks adds a job to their site that checks the del.icio.us RSS feeds of its members periodically. When it finds a new bookmark with that tag it grabs the url of the bookmarked page and submits it to the site.
2. Set up a site/service with a name like TweetIt, or something similar. Users register their del.icio.us username and Twitter info (or Jaiku, or Pownce, or whatever) with the site. If they tag a bookmark with a special tag like “tweetit” the site will pick it up from their del.icio.us RSS feed and automatically post it as an update to the user’s Twitter account (or Jaiku or Pownce, etc).
3. Link bloggers could build a custom site/service/tool that looks for special tags in their del.icio.us RSS feed and formats a blog post for them with those links and descriptions, maybe even auto submits it to their blog using the MetaBlog API. For example, Dave Burke has an on-going series of blog posts called “Stylin” where he posts a screenshot and a short description of site designs that he likes. Dave could bookmark sites that he likes in del.icio.us, tag them with a special tag (something like “stylin” maybe), and then provide a description with the bookmark. He could then build a little application that polls his del.icio.us RSS feed for that tag, grabs new ones and creates a “draft” blog post for each one using the description he supplied. Hmm, maybe if Dave’s clever enough he could also have the application navigate to the site and grab a screenshot, too. :)
Hopefully I’ve redeemed myself with a some better examples than yesterday’s. Perhaps I’ve even provided a spark to get your creative juices flowing.