It’s the next Google. It’s a site that does something so well, and so cleanly, that it just becomes a part of you. “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ is a social bookmarking site.

I find an article that I want to remember, so I press a bookmarklet in my browsers tool bar. A small window pops up, and I add a half a sentence highlighting why I bookmarked it. I press save and go about me work. Later I check my del.icio.us, and see that four other people have bookmarked that particular article. I look at their bookmarks, find them interesting, and subscribe. As they go about bookmarking articles and sites, the bookmarks come into my rss reader.

This is real social software.

And it’s scary like Amazon. The first time I ever used Amazon, I was wanting to point an acquaintance towards a few of the best military strategy books I’ve read. I searched on amazon for each, and then passed him the url. When I was done I looked down at the recommended books list. There were two hard to find, excellent books that I had been wanting to own for months, and third that I owned and loved. Hundreds of thousands of books on Amazon, and it showed me the ones I wanted and trusted.

On del.icio.us I will see my “friends” posting links to the exact articles or sites that I have found useful. I subscribed to “gerryg’s links”:http://del.icio.us/gerryg a few days ago. He “bookmarked”:http://del.icio.us/gerryg/2004-04-08 the Lipsum generator that I’ve been happily using for a almost a year now.

I just hope del.icio.us can keep it free.