Joshua Schachter started...
Joshua Schachter started the collaborative bookmarking
site del.icio.us in 2003. As often happens with startups,
del.icio.us began as something Schachter built for
himself. He needed a way of organizing his collection of
20,000 bookmarks, and he hit on the idea of “tagging”
them with brief text phrases to help him find links later.
He put del.icio.us on a server and opened it up to other
people, and it began to spread by word of mouth.
For the first several years, Schachter worked on
del.icio.us and other projects, like Memepool and
GeoURL, while working as a quantitative analyst
at Morgan Stanley. But all the while, del.icio.us was growing. By November
2004, a year after its release, it had 30,000 users.
In early 2005, Schachter decided to turn del.icio.us from a hobby into a
company. In March of 2005, he left his job to “found” del.icio.us and focus on it
full-time, raising $1 million in funding.
In December of that year, Yahoo acquired del.icio.us for an amount
rumored to be about $30 million.
Livingston: Take me back to how you got started with del.icio.us.
Schachter: It goes back quite a while. In 1998 or so I created a website called
Memepool. There was an editor, with reader submission. We had a contribution
pool, and we’d edit and post stuff. It was chronologically sorted, updated
every couple of days—so it was basically a blog before that word came out. We
put a link at the bottom, “Send us an email. Give us good links.” And people
would email us stuff they found on the Web. I would dutifully look at it and
write it down. It took me a long time to post anything, because I’m not a great
writer.
Over time, I had these links that just piled up—links that I’d found, or
surfed for, or had been sent in, or whatever. By 2001 or so, I had a text file filled
with 20,000 links. I couldn’t find anything in that file anymore, so I started putting
in notes. I’d put the URL, a space, a hash mark, and then a word or two
describing it. I think the first one was “math,” so I could grep out all the things
that were #math and get all my items marked as math. In some sense, these
were the first tags.
After a while, I couldn’t really do this, so I built a sort of next generation of
that text file, which was called Muxway, in 2001. It was a lot like del.icio.us.
There was a bookmarklet; you saved things; you could describe and tag them. It
was single-player—no one else could use it—but the actual website was visible
to other people. I discovered over time that people were subscribing to my
| ← locked that in. | bookmarks. There were → |