Piggybacking on del.icio.us
A rich system of extensions and hacks for del.icio.us is growing on the web, piggybacking in fascinating ways on its infrastructure of users and data.
An excellent example i came across today is the del.icio.us linkbacks bookmarklet: it’ll display commentary and tags by del.icio.us users on any given site in a pop-up window as sort of site-annotations. Basically it’s just a new way to display existing and actively expanded data, but through re-appropriation of this data it’s potentially luring new users in, spurring further activity and allowing for novel and unforeseen uses of del.icio.us.
You should take a look at this nice overview of innovative del.icio.us tools and hacks for a small glimpse at this fascinating new infrastructure. Open apis aren’t particularly new, but i’ve never before seen such innovative and versatile development around a single platform. What i find most interesting is that most of these hacks are themselves user-friendly, installation-free web-services living on someone’s server or bookmarklets living in your browser, a prime example of the browser-as-platform paradigm.