Del.icio.us better watchout, because there is a new kid on the block: Simpy. While I have not noticed many new features out of del.icio.us since the experimental posting page, simpy is regularly adding useful new features. Thing I have noticed so far that Simpy does that del.icio.us doesn’t do (or I have failed to find):

  1. It lets you essentially make Boolean expressions with tags. So instead of clicking on Development, and then seeing that it shares some links with java – I would expect when I click on java, I would only see links that are *only* java AND development – not so on delicious – in stead I’ll see all of java. Being able to narrow down tags is a *huge* improvement. Not only can you focus in on tags, but you can also remove links from the results based on tag. Very useful. I pretty much always wished del.icio.us had this feature.
  2. Private links. Del.icio.us is great, and I love being able to share links with everyone – but there are some links that I just want to share across my browsers – and not other people. Say like the link to my bank and credit card company – or links from my company’s intranet.
  3. Groups. Simpy lets the user join groups, and post links for the consumption of the other people in the group – once a link has been posted, you can then mark it as read – allowing you to track what you ahve looked at. Sweet.
  4. Topics. Ever want to track someone else’s links on delicious? Simpy apparently lets you do this in what it calls a topic.
  5. Notes. Simpy lets you take notes with their system that you can tag the same way you tag links. Not much use to me yet, but an interesting idea – since it’s centralized, it offers the same benefits for notes that both systems offer for links.
  6. The killer one: Sync from del.icio.us. All the effort you have put into tagging things on del.icio.us is not lost – simpy can suck all the links out of your del.icio.us account, and it will tag them appropriately, meaning you lose nothing. This means testing Simpy is pretty risk free, because you can take your existing links, pull them in and see if you like it.

Now, it’s not all better then del.icio.us. If there is one single thing I think del.icio.us does far better it’s the link add form. The experimental interface for del.icio.us deals with tags far more eloquently then simpy’s tagging interface. Where del.icio.us will recommend tags to you from *your* tags, as well as showing you all your tags, and showing you popular ones, Simpy has a truncated list of your tags, and only tells you popular ones. This makes it *really* hard to consistantly use the same tags in your link collection. Furthur, del.icio.us’s link add page is far more eloquent allowing you to simply click or unclick the tag to add or remove tags. Simpy divides it across the page so that your tags are in a textbox, but there are a series of checkboxes on the side of the screen where you can add predefined tags. Unlike delicious, when you check one of those boxes, it doesn’t populate the link textbox, and unchecking it doesn’t remove one. The Simpy developers would do well to take a page from del.icio.us on tagging interface – the one area where del.icio.us far outshines simpy.

You can find me there are soulcatcher.