Schachter “Totally Thrilled” With Delicious

The social bookmarking site recently passed one million registered users, just ahead of its third birthday. Joshua Schachter isn’t settling for a slice of Delicious birthday cake; he’s got plans for the site that will go deeper than the Popular list. Much deeper.

Their third birthday party will be October 3rd, and Joshua wanted me to be sure to mention it again. So here it is: the Delicious birthday party will be at Yahoo’s mothership in Sunnyvale. Your RSVP has been kindly requested. They are giving out the presents and serving the treats, and the list of attendees is close to full, so touch base with them soon if you want to be part of the fun.

I asked him about the million member mark. “Totally thrilled,” he said. “It was kind of a surprise.” Only nine months after becoming part of Yahoo, and part of the foundation of the company’s social media efforts, one million members represented more than triple the registrations Delicious possessed before the Mergers & Acquisitions team at Yahoo sealed the deal.

Naturally there was life at Delicious well before Yahoo came calling. Joshua recounted how his early efforts produced a single-user project. “The challenge was to scale that,” he said, noting how server and database activity not only had to scale, but social scaling, increasing the interaction between Delicious users, needed to accomplish that too.

Perusing the Delicious blog offers a look at how Joshua has approached social scaling. New features like the “your network” and “your fans” demonstrate Joshua’s focus here.

After next week’s celebration bash, long after the candles have been blown out, the food devoured, the last attendee helped to a cab by burly security types, it will be time to move forward. Joshua has a plan there too, which should really enhance what Delicious is now.

Joshua noted how groups have found ad hoc ways to work together using Delicious. He wants to empower them to work together better. There’s a lot more Delicious can provide to its users, Joshua said.

The site has a lot of knowledge contained in its bookmarks, and plenty of expertise within that more than one million-strong userbase. If they can better expose that knowledge, if they can highlight those experts, other users will have the opportunity to discover so much more than they can today.

That is what Joshua wants to accomplish next. It will be, well, Delicious, if he can.

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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.