Facebook have recently got a lot of flak for changes to their default privacy settings, terms of service and strategic partnerships. People (and applications) are moving away from the social networking platform and the list of reasons to do so is quite compelling:

• Ten reasons
• A security leak
• Another security leak
• Their blatant landgrab for the semantic web has annoyed me and others
• Third parties adding apps to your Facebook page

I signed up for a developer account, read the Terms Of Service and played around with the API. I’ve also experimented with advertising on Facebook and after a while it becomes obvious that Facebook’s business model is to rent your data out to those willing to invest time (in developing free applications) or simple cash.

However, I will continue with Facebook and here’s why - my Facebook friends.

Friends: Not Fans, Not Followers, Not Community

The vast majority of my Facebook friends are people that I have met in real life, that I have worked with, been to school with or had a beer with and I want to interact with the way non-geeks do.

The geek in me prefers to share photos via Flickr; cool sites via delicious; status updates on twitter; longer messages via email; music via Last.fm and use a host of other specialised services that blow Facebook applications out of the water.

I’m no big fan of Facebook but my friends are on there and that is why I’ll stay.

Facebook is the lowest common denominator of online sharing and that suits a lot of people - people who struggle to keep their email contacts up to date, or don’t understand upload quotas, or cannot install browser plugins. For those people Facebook just works - we developers must remember that.

I Will Be Keeping An Eye On My Privacy

Whilst all of the information in my Facebook profile is available on other websites, I will keep an active eye on my privacy settings and recommending that everyone disable instant personalisation (howto guide here).

I also block a lot of Facebook applications - I just don’t trust them to follow the terms of service even after Facebook has weakened its data-retention rules. I recommend that others do the same, but I also recognise that many are willing to trade privacy for Bejewelled Blitz, Farmville or Mafia Wars.

Facebook Will Die One Day

Just not today.

Communities are fickle, and Facebook is a behemoth with a lot of traction in the lives of ordiniary people, just like Yahoo was and AOL before it. What is needed to make people move is an alternative that is very obviously better in the eyes of the average user (not just the techies currently pushing towards an open, decentralised replacement).

Remember when Google replaced Alta Vista as the most popular search engine? Heh, maybe not; that was a long time ago in internet-years, but I do. All the geeks shouted about how a new search engine’s results weren’t influenced by advertising, how you couldn’t buy placement, the purity of the algorithm, etc.

When Joe Schmoe visited google.com for the first time, he saw a text box and two buttons - and that was better than the busy portals offered by its rivals. Then he tried it out, and the results were good - better than competing search engines - and so Joe had a new favourite search engine. The algorithm didn’t matter; the revenue model didn’t matter; the user experience did matter.

So, developers should not just make an open Facebook, they must make a better social networking site. One that is obviously much better from the first glance and stays better the more you use it.

Facebook are reacting to user concerns too, but it remains to be seen whether this is just PR, or if there will be a root-and-branch change in the company’s practices. I suspect not, they make money by offering access to your info to advertisers and developers so a new revenue model would be needed.

Are You Deleting Your Facebook Account?

Go you! You’ll be part of a mass movement if you quit on the 31^st May 2010. The instructions are here.

See this screenshot for what to expect (it’s quite sneaky).

Leave a comment and tell me which (if any) other social networks you’ll be using in future, or if you will stay on Facebook, tell me why.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Franco Bouly.

A few weeks ago, I got a DM from Justin Vincent asking me for feedback on his latest project - TweetMiner. I’ve been trying it on and off for a while now and I must say that I’m impressed - it’s a solid piece of work that knows its target users.

What Is TweetMiner?

Available as an Adobe AIR application as well as a traditional web app, TweetMiner provides a dashboard for one or more twitter accounts. Each account has a set of streams associiated with it - by default you get the usual tweets from your friends, mentions, direct messages etc. You can add streams from individual users and/or twitter searches.

Each Twitter account can post an update immediately or schedule one for the future including the ability to add them to a “recurring schedule” (more on this below).

As well as the Twitter streams, you can add RSS feeds but this is no feed reader to rival Google Reader or NewsGator. The feed entries can be instantly tweeted or scheduled and you get to edit the message before it is sent, unlike Google Reader’s Send To feature.

TweetMiner’s Recurring Schedule

The recurring schedule is designed to prevent users from flooding their Twitter stream with updates when they find a rich seam of new information that they want to share.

You can configure the schedule to post queued tweets every few minutes and (optionally restrict it to between certain hours) for example every thirty minutes between 8am and 7pm.

TweetMiner Is For Power Users

After just a few minutes of using TweetMiner, it quickly becomes obvious that the tool is aimed squarely at Twitter’s power user community - the so-called social media gurus.

The real-time web loves breaking news and integrating RSS feeds with Twitter is a common strategy amongst those wanting to build followers. That is not to say that TweetMiner is for bots and spammers - feed entries are not mindlessly tweeted, instead the user must choose the items to tweet and can edit the text before sending.

TweetMiner is monetised via a Freemium pricing model that means users must pay to user large numbers of twitter accounts, scheduled messages or track their links via bit.ly. All these features will appeal to marketers looking to leverage Twitter and connect with large numbers of people.

It’s Not Perfect

It’s still early days for TweetMiner, but since Justin asked for my feedback I’ll list a few comments here:

• The page layout does not make great use of the limited screen real-estate on my Linux netbook.
• I’d like to see my RSS feeds merged into one stream - not an issue with just five streams but with many hundreds of potential news sources that would affect user experience.
• I’m not sure what advantage the Adobe AIR version brings? Using TweetMiner offline doesn’t make much sense to me - perhaps Justin could give us an answer in the comments.
• The "Please Upgrade to Firefox 3.5" dialog on every page is pretty annoying. After closing this once, I’d like to see it revert to a ribbon across the top of the page.

Not too many complaints there - I like Twetminer a lot and think it is definitely on track to become a very powerful tool. Oh, and I’d really, really like to see an API released for it too.

So I do recommend that you check TweetMiner out and I’ll be following its progress with interest (and using it to post to Twitter from time to time). You can sign up using the link below:

Finding Breaking News To Post To Twitter

Of course, you need to find some good sources of breaking news to get the most out of TweetMiner - preferrably sources that few other people use. So instead oof just tweeting the latest posts from TechCrunch or Mashable (good though both those blogs are), try thinking creatively to find interesting content.

Here are some of my tips for building a network of great sources of new and diverse content:

The Old Guard

Many of the first generation of social websites are still going very strong, with loyal, intelligent users that like to discuss the issues of the day in great detail. Sites like Slashdot, MetaFilter (and its simian sibling) are still great. Whilst K5 is good for US politics and B3ta is great for peurile British humour.

Google Trends & Alerts

Both Google Trends and Google Alerts can provide RSS feeds, allowing you to find out what people are searching for and be notified whenever a new blog post covers an area that you are interested in.

Feeds Of Search Results

Both Bing and Yahoo provide feeds of their search results so grab a few for some narrow keywords and plug them into TweetMiner.

Google doesn’t like to release its SERPs via RSS, but luckily there is

Smaller Social Sites

There are loads of niche social bookmarking sites out there if you look beyond Digg and Reddit. Places like Kirtsy, Mister wong and Twine have gold in their upcoming story sections. You can also check out this long list of niche social media sites on Traffikd.

Delicious Tags & Networks

I rave about how useful delicious.com is all the time and I am constantly amazed at how few people use it to its full potential.

Build a great Delicious network or grab an RSS feed from a number of tags and plug it into TweetMiner to find those gems that people will want to read again later. You could always add me to your delicious network too!

Do you know of any other great but unsung sources of breaking news of interesting content? Let me know in the comments.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by cobalt123.

So, most of you now know that Hackday North was cancelled after Dom’s announcement on his blog. To borrow Dom’s words, I’m gutted too - it promised to be a fun day, with lots of geeky (and non-geeky) activities planned.

After a chance meeting on Park Row, we decided to meet up for a beer and catch up. As luck would have it, we settled on Wednesday evening - the night of a new event called Social Networking Zero (AKA SN-Zero).

Social Networking ZERO

Organised by Matt Pallat of 26.point.1, the premise behind SN-Zero was to get back to the roots of social networking, to allow digital marketing professionals to talk to each other around tables that had beer on them, not netbooks with free wi-fi.

The event fulfilled its brief perfectly, thanks to sponsor Hotfoot Recruitment’s generous free bar and the hard-working staff at The Adelphi.

The night was well-attended by a mix of people from the tech scene in Leeds and everyone was getting merry when I left (quite early, sorry!). I hope that Matt continues to organise more SN-Zero events.

Barcamp Adelaide, Anyone?

Whilst I’m on the subject of social geeks, it looks like a BarCamp is being organised for Adelaide. It’s still in the very early planning stages but if you want to get involved, do get in touch with Monnie.

I hope to get involved, and I might even present something.

Since delicious announced new tools to share bookmarks last week, I’ve been on the lookout for examples of them in the wild. It seems that the Twitter integration is becoming popular because I’ve noticed quite a few tweets that make use of delicious’s URL shortener - icio.us. Here’s a search that shows all those tweets as they arrive in realtime.

The URL shortener is a nice use of the old del.icio.us domain - one of the original (and coolest) domain hacks on the web, that spawned a thousand imitators.

Tweets sent via delicious require your password (instead of using the more secure OAuth protocol) which is a shame but I think we can probably trust Yahoo with our passwords (it has been my OpenID provider for many years). The tweets are also marked as being sent via the API but hopefully the twitter devs will add delicious to the list of approved applications very soon.

Whilst I have my misgivings about the new delicious frontpage, and I’m not alone, I like these new features and I hope that delicious continues to integrate and becomes a bit more daring in some of its future innovations.

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More On Delicious:

• 10 Interesting People You Should Have In Your Delicious Network
• I Love Delicious Because It’s Selfish
• How To Store Color Palettes

In a bored moment the other day I was idly looking to see which (if any) other top level domain names are owned by twitter.com. The answer is, none.

This is quite a common mistake made by startups, they work incredibly hard to become a global brand and then discover that a bunch of domainers and/or squatters have taken the different, localised variations of their brand name.

However, it seems that Twitter might be about to remedy the situation as Smart Company (AU) reports that Twitter retained Melbourne IT company to manage its domain portfolio. My investigations (below) show that one of the biggest threats to Twitter’s brand comes from twitter.com.au so that might indicate a reason for choosing an Australian company, although there’s no official comment yet.

Let’s have a look at those other twitter TLDs that are polluting the brand of a company that might be worth as much as $250 million US:

Global TLDs

• twitter.net - a site for birdwatchers with a nice big link to twitter.com on the homepage. No real brand pollution here.
• twitter.org - a squatted domain with no website (the owner is missing out on some adevertising revenue methinks). If a website appears, it could do some brand damage to twitter but there are no immediate problems.
• twitter.info - redirects to a twitter users account. Nice use of the domain name and no brand damage here.
• twitter.me - another squatted domain with no website.
• twitter.biz - a squatted domain, currently parked at GoDaddy and displaying Twitter related products.
• twitter.mobi - another one that’s squatted without a website.
• twitter.name - redirects to twitter.us.

Country Specific TLDs

• twitter.us - parked at GoDaddy and showing twitter related adverts.
• twitter.co.uk - this should be ringing some alarms bells at twitter.com. The page sells advertising and donates the money to charity but it does complain about twitter.com’s policy of not verifying email addresses for new accounts and the story was picked up by the UK Guardian’s Digital Media blog. By all accounts the owner is not maliciously squatting the domain, nor does he want to sell so twitter.com could easily address his grievances to remedy any branding issues.
• twitter.com.au - This site seems to be an out-and-out attempt to cash in on the twitter name - lots of irrelevant adverts. Ev and Biz want to get this fixed ASAP.
• twitter.fr - redirects to twitter.com. It’s registered owner is Melbourne IT, so owned by Twitter.
• twitter.ie - parked and displaying adverts.
• twitter.es - parked but no website.
• twitter.ca - a nice little informational website that makes clear it has no affiliation with twitter.com.
• twitter.co.nz - parked and displaying adverts.
• twitter.tv - parked and displaying adverts.

All of the other ccTLDs I tried were parked with or without an associated website.

Misspellings

I tried a few misspellings of twitter.com (such as twiter.com and twiitter.com) and they were all parked too. There is also twittersucks.com for a few LOLs.

So, What Should Twitter Do?

It would make sense to keep the owner of twitter.co.uk happy and block signups using an email address from twitter.co.uk as that is what he wants and a quick, technical fix should satisfy the guy.

The squatted domains may be different. Twitter is still a very well-loved service but users are fickle and domain squatters could be quick to exploit (or provoke) bad feeling. If I were in Twitter’s position right now, I’d buy up a few of those top level domain names using a discreet third-party and (hopefully) without resorting to legal threats.

Most domainers are happy to make a quick buck and it is usually cheaper to buy them off than to pay a gaggle of lawyers. Keeping branding issues out of the press can also be a consideration, so a quiet back-channel can be useful. Whatever you think of the morality is domain squatting, it happens and successful companies will need to deal with it at some stage - better to do so earlier than later.

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More On Twitter:

• How To Configure Twitterfox
• Twitter Beginners Guide
• Are You A Twitter Weirdo?

This post came about after a short Twitter exchange with DeWitt Clinton (he’s @dewitt on Twitter). He asked:

Where do you find new interesting sites/memes *before* they hit digg, popurls, techmeme, reddit, etc? The more tech flavored the better.

I answered that I have a great network on delicious.com that provides me with that kind of thing. His reply got me thinking:

I’ve been treating delicious as write-only for years

This is exactly why del.icio.us is so powerful - the data that people enter is for their own use!

Delicious Is Anti-Social Bookmarking

We delicious users all store bookmarks (and colour palettes) for our own reference. Unlike Digg, Mixx, Reddit et al we’re not adding bookmarks to send traffic or become a top user or hit the front page or stimulate discussion. There’s little SEO, marketing or self-promotional value to being a popular delicious user (the front page sends a lot of traffic but that’s not the same as being a popular user).

We are being selfish and it’s powerful.

It’s powerful because it’s also open. If can identify a thought-leader in a given and he has a delicious account, I can see which sites he thinks are important enough to save for later reference.

This is very similar to my twitter philosophy of “follow interesting people” (stolen, I think, from Robert Scoble).

How To Build Your Delicious Network

I’ve got around forty people in my network right now, each one is active and interesting so I get about thirty to fifty interesting new links sent to me every day. Here’s how I found those people:

1. Pick subjects of interest - check your top ten tags if you’re not sure
2. Find out who the thought leaders are in each area. You probably know who they are already, but you can always find more. Use tools like:
   • Google blog search
   • Twitter - search for hashtags and just ask people
   • FriendFeed
   • Academic papers
3. You’ll find that a lot of people use the same username on all their Web 2.0 sites so check if they have a delicious account
4. If their delicious username isn’t obvious, try FriendFeed. That has links to a person’s delicious account under their list of services
5. Check their blog - lots of people automatically post their bookmarks every week using a Wordpress plugin
6. Try SocialWhoIs
7. When you have found their delicious profile, click the “Add to my network” link and then click “Yes” to confirm - I always forget to confirm

Build up a good sized network and check back periodically for new links (the Delicious Firefox plugin will highlight the network icon in the status bar if you have unread links in your network).

Enjoy - if you have geeky interests you can find my delicious profile here but only add me if you find my links interesting!

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Thomas R. Stegelmann.

So you’ve given in to the online hype and the pleadings of your friends and signed up for Twitter, but it’s not the Web 2.0 utopia you were led to believe, it’s a quiet little space with no mates, no fun and little to keep you there. Before you give up and go back to Myspace, give the suggestions in here a try.

Signing Up

Signing up is pretty straightforward if you can still find a name available. If not, get creative, try to avoid using your birth year though - that’s a bit lame.

HINT: Try to pick a fairly unique name that you’ll be able to use across different websites. It really helps other people to find you if you have a consistent identity.

If you use a webmail account (like GMail or Yahoo Mail), let Twitter look through your contacts to see if it recognises anyone. The guys behind Twitter are quite trustworthy, I’ve not heard of any privacy arising from this step.

Follower Suggestions

Twitter provides a list of people that it suggests you follow, and how you answer will affect how you use it. This list is a selection of very popular people on the site, like basketball star Shaquille O’Neil, US sitcom star Ellen Degeneres, top-flight CEOs.

It will also suggest bots like CNNs breaking news feed or Gordon Brown’s moronic list of public engagements. Some of these can be really useful - others, like Brown, are wasteful noise.

Careful though. Whilst most celebrities and CEOs often do engage with others on Twitter, they can’t talk with every one of their forty thousand followers. If in doubt, don’t follow any of these suggested people - you can always find them later.

All Signed Up, What’s Next? Who Should I Follow?

Just a minute. There’s another step that will really help you to make new friends on Twitter: Fill out your profile!

Go to the “settings” link at the top-right and (at the very least) fill out the two fields labelled “One Line Bio” and “Location”.

These are important because when you follow someone, they get an email telling them that you are following. Most users will then check out your profile to see if you’re interesting enough to follow back so spend a little time thinking about your biography. You can be informative, playful, caring etc. but you’ve got to be short.

You Need A Picture Too

After completing your profile, please take the time to add a little picture to represent you. When everyone first signs up they get a drab brown picture like this:

Make yourself stand out from the crowd with a nice picture. It doesn’t have to be a photo of your face (or any other part of you) but that doesn’t hurt either. You can create a fun cartoon face with this tool, which is very popular.

Once you have the picture you want, click the “Picture” tab on your Twitter profile settings page. Then “Browse” to choose the file with your picture and “Save”.

Now Can I Follow People And Have Fun?

Yes, yes you can.

But How Do I Find People To Follow On Twitter

Good question. First, try to think of what kind of people you want to follow: artistic people, geeks, musicians, students, business people, pet lovers, parents - there are people of all kinds on Twitter, from atheists to zoologists.

Then, when you know who you are looking for, try these:

Directories

There are quite a few Twitter directories that have people divided into categories by their interests:

• Twellow
• We Follow
• Just Tweet It

HINT: Add yourself to these directories so other people can find you and follow you.

Search Twitter

It’s not obvious from the homepage (yet) but Twitter does have a search function. Try searching for phrases related to your interests and click the pictures of the people returned to see if they are interesting.

Hopefully, now you see why it was so important to fill out your profile and get a picture!

HINT: You might see words starting with a hash (#) in the search results. People use these to share tweets about a specific event or subject - try finding one related to your interests and searching for it.

Search Google

Most people on Twitter have their own website or blog and they will link to their Twitter page with the words “follow me on twitter” so try googling for that and some other words to find out more about them than will fit into their short Twitter biography.

HINT: Got a Facebook page? Add a link to your Twitter profile.

I’m Following People, What Do I Talk About?

Pretty much, whatever you want but if you want a conversation you need to be interesting and engaging. Try some of these tactics:

• Ask questions
• Answer questions
• “I’m reall excited about...”
• “This is a funny picture” (add a link to the picture)

People Aren’t Following Me Back!

They will. Give it time and keep being interesting. Eventually it all snowballs and you’ll feel really important to the internet.

More Help

This post was written as a response to a (real life, not twitter) conversation I had with @JS__78 at the weekend and I hope it inspires her to give Twitter another try - please follow her and give her a bit of support.

I’ll write a followup with some more tips for intermediate users soon (and maybe an advanced one later). In the meantime you might like one of my earlier posts of Twitter Tips.

Check out other websites for lots of Twitter tips, this is a great post by @dhollings.

Finally, if you’ve still got questions, ask away in the comments below or catch me on Twitter.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by davemelbourne.

Since Twitter stopped updating UK users via SMS about six months ago, there have been a number of third parties stepping up to offer support.

Getting SMS updates was a useful feature, but not a must have for me at least so I didn’t try any of the paid up-front services listed below:

• TwitSMS
• TweetSMS
• TwitMobile
• TweetBoxLive

I’m sure there are many others too, leave a comment if you know of one.

Free, At Last

After doing without SMS updates, a free service caught my eye. Twe2 offers advert-supported delivery of your Twitter direct messages via SMS.

I checked out the company (it’s been whitelisted by Twitter and is using the Wadja network to provide the adverts), and signed up and I've been testing the service for about a fortnight now.

First impressions are great - it does exactly what it says on the tin. You get an SMS sent to your phone for each Twitter DM you receive. The tweet gets truncated to 91 characters to make room for the advert at the end but I haven’t found this to be a problem so far.

Not Quite As Good As Twitter

Unlike the old Twitter service, you don’t get fine control over which users send direct messages to your phone - there are no equivalents to Twitter’s on and off commands - it’s all or nothing.

This is a feature that I really miss, I used to get a useful SMS when my website went down or I had to take urgent action.

Better Than Twitter

Unlike Twitter’s service, Twe2 can send SMS alerts based on searches that you configure against the full public stream. The total number of text messages you get from Twe2 is rate limited to a maximum of a hundred per hour, very useful if you set an alert for a term that goes hot!

Don’t Use Autofollow DMs

Pretty soon after I started with Twe2, I received twenty(!) copies of the same direct message from @seolman thanking me for following him.

I was pretty annoyed and immediately blocked him.

It turned out that it was due to a horrendous bug in TweetLater - a Twitter service that I use too. I unblocked seolman since he was very apologetic.

I was also unwittingly sending auto-follow DMs due to another bug in TweetLater for which I humbly apologise. I don’t think any of my followers got twenty messages but let me know if you did!

Twitter To Re-Instate UK SMS?

Hopefully, Twe2 will keep on innovating and find some way to match the Twitter functionality, but all their effort might be for nought if this interview is to be believed.

Twe2 is a good service that I recommend and it shows how innovative coders will work around the artificial restrictions put in place by short-sighted, greedy telecoms companies. Any British mobile phone operator with half a brain would have jumped at the chance to have a high-profile client like Twitter and should have offered a very deep discount.

My Twitter followers map generated a huge buzz last year, despite its shortcomings, so I resolved to improve upon it. I’m quite pleased with the results considering it’s all done with Yahoo Pipes so I hardly had to write any code.

The map shows all of the people you follow on Twitter and so it doesn’t need your Twitter password. Many people were rightly wary about handing over their twitter password to plot their followers and nobody would put the map on their blog because it needed the password to be stored in plain text. When Twitter finalises its OAuth support, I’ll release a version that uses it and shows your followers.

There are a number of other improvements too!

• It now uses Google Maps
• More than 100 people can be shown - anyone you follow with a location in the Twitter profile will show up on the map
• It can understand iPhone locations, like iPhone:-74.356,35.641
• Click on a marker to see the person’s Twitter bio, last tweet and a link to their Twitter page
• Your location is shown with a distinctive red marker
• Generate code to embed your map on your blog or website

Some Caveats

The map pushes Yahoo Pipes pretty hard and sometimes there can be timeouts or over-capacity errors. The only answer to these is just to bear with it, once your list of friends has been calculated it should be cached and everything should be fine.

Similarly, if you follow thousands of people your map is going to get really clogged up with markers and slow the web browser - so careful Stephen Fry!

Try It Out

The map has its own special landing page now, so head on over to try it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

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Funky Twitter icon by PhireDesign (CC licensed).

Delicious is the grandaddy of social bookmarking sites and it’s still going strong. If you’re not using the social aspect of the site then you’re missing out on a great way to find hidden gems of information.

I’ve done the hard work for you and discovered ten really interesting people that you should have in your del.icio.us network. Here they are, in no particular order:

Joshua Schachter - joshua

The creator of delicious itself (as well as many other useful sites), he’s left the company now but still using the service. With over 10,000 public bookmarks, he is a great guy to follow if you want to see a power user in action.

Jeremy Zawodny - jzawodn

Another ex-Yahoo employee, Jeremy is a MySql guru but bookmarks all kinds of tech and programming information. He uses delicious’s description field well, making useful notes against his 5,900 bookmarks.

Steve Rubel - steverubel

Public relations guru Steve is all over the web, but he still stores his bookmarks at delicious.com. Steve’s bookmarks have a heavy slant towards blogging and marketing but he definitely sorts the wheat from the chaff. A great addition to your network if you have a blog.

Joost Devalk - jdevalk

Joost is a WordPress coder and web designer so, as you’d imagine, his bookmarks cover a range to technical, internet-related subjects. He’s often first with links to newly released WordPress plugins but he saves lots of Javascript links too.

Chris Brogan - chrisbrogan

If there’s anyone in your network already, it’s probably social media guru Chris. He’s got loads of fans! His posts regularly hit the popular page of delicious too - this is a man that’s walking the talk.

Tamar Weinberg - tami

You probably know who Tamar Weinberg is by now - she’s truly “Internet Famous”. A social media marketer, blogger, online journalist and all-round techie, loads of interesting stuff bookmarked.

Jeff Smith - teknokool

Another Social Media guru (don’t there seem to be a lot of them on social media?). Jeff bookmarks much more technical information than most SMMs. He’s not afraid to roll up his sleaves and get into a bit of code, and his homepage is jeffisageek.net, which always makes me laugh.

Peter(?) Skomoroch - pskomoroch

I don’t know very much about pskomoroch (I’m not even sure that his first name is Peter) but I do know that he loves his data. If you need to train an AI or load a database full of test data then check out his dataset tag - there are riches there!

Louis Gray - louismg

Silicon Valley tech blogger extraordinaire Louis Gray currently threatens Robert Scoble’s position as King Of The Geeks and, unlike Scoble, he’s active on delicious. If you want the scoop on hot new startups, Louis’s bookmarks are a great place to look.

dadavidov

Finally, you know that delicious is really good for bookmarking MP3 files don’t you? Well, dadavidov has over 800 tracks bookmarked for you to enjoy.

So there we have it, ten del.icio.us power users for you to add to your network (don’t forget to add me too!)

Oh, and did you know that delicious is great for bookmarking colour palettes too? Really useful for designers.

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Creative Commons licensed p-hoto by Laughing Squid.