/Interview/ Joshua Schachter
26/09/2006 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Joshua Schachter could never have predicted how successful his creation would become. Although he doesn’t curse the explosion of tagging, or the cash Yahoo! was prepared to pay for it, he’s pretty worn out by his rise to web stardom.
As we walk along Kensington High Street, the strain of jet lag is obvious on Joshua’s face as he fights off the fatigue and adjusts to being in London. Joshua is no stranger to the city, having worked here for a while, but it’s a far cry from the relative peace of his new home in sun-drenched California. He has brought something of the West Coast cool with him, having launched in to his speech on ‘things we have learned’ at the Future of Web Apps summit. A few hours earlier, he’d confessed: “This is just a jumble of stuff that occurred to me.” All the same, he was met by the rapturous applause of a hugely appreciative audience, which must have seemed all the more daunting when hundreds of laptop lids flipped open as soon as he took the stage.
“CSS and rendering issues will drive you nuts,” were his first pearls of wisdom. He should know. Joshua single-handedly brought Delicious to life with endless hours of trial and error. Plenty of chuckles emanated from the audience, but all were poised on the edge of their seats to hear how exactly Joshua arrived at the bookmarking phenomenon Delicious. And well they might: he sold it to Yahoo! for around $30 million (£17.5 million).
It’s all in a name
The world knows Delicious as ‘del.icio.us’, but Joshua admits he isn’t too fond of that style for writing the name, and says he chose in the first place simply because he thought it was funny. Joshua also says that, in retrospect, he probably should have kept the original Muxway name. “It’s easier to figure out where the dots go,” he says.
In less than three years, Joshua has come from being a Wall Street trader to one of the web’s bestknown names, and it all started with the humble bookmark – hardly anything revolutionary to the web. “I was looking for a way to save and manage my bookmarks better. The browser is fine for single users, but doesn’t support multiple users very well,” he says. “The first system I developed was Muxway, but before that I was adding coded notes for links to tag them. I made Muxway to solve my own problems, then I realised I had solved the same issues for everyone. Tagging kind of predates the Delicious engine. Now we have a bookmark store and a place to browse other’s tags.” The multi-user angle may have changed Muxway a lot, but the interface looks similar to Joshua’s original concept from 2001.
It’s a good time to be the creator of a huge web community like Delicious, but Joshua admits it wasn’t always plain sailing. Building your own web app is a painstaking process, even if you are a coding whiz. “I was doing pretty much everything myself until relatively recently. It takes over pretty quickly, and at times was pretty stressful.” Stability was a major issue for Joshua: often in the middle of the night, he would have to get up and deal with server issues. “Sometimes I was away and couldn’t deal with it immediately, so it had to wait, unfortunately. Wouldn’t let that happen now!”
Joshua did have one major trick up his sleeve, though: he was pretty hot on the enterprise front, even though he doesn’t see himself as an entrepreneur as such. “I’ve done a bunch of different things, but working in finance at Morgan Stanley has been my life for years. It’s technical and mathematical – Delicious isn’t that much different in some ways.”
But, as Joshua spelled out for attendees at the Future of Web Apps, “It doesn’t really matter where you’re coming from, because you’re not making a community as such: you’re making a tool, and need to treat it as such.” The tagging premise behind Delicious is so very Web 2.0, but Joshua wasn’t thinking about that in 2003. “The Web 2.0 tag isn’t that meaningful in some ways, but it did get a lot of people out to discuss what the web is. So I guess it’s a good thing.”
One thing’s for sure: apps like Delicious are growing in stature all the time, and it’s an exciting sphere of the web. Joshua says that Web 2.0 has reinvigorated an online spirit that had been dulled since the crash of the internet economy. “There’s so much going on out there these days, whether it has a Web 2.0 tag or not. There’s a real enthusiasm in the creative sphere, and plenty of passionate people out there doing stuff. It’s no longer the post-bust ghost town of the last few years, it’s exciting again. People are starting to build on things, but at the same time are saying ‘let’s not worry too much about what other folks are doing.’” Clearly, Yahoo! wasn’t in agreement, as it made strong moves to make certain that Google didn’t get to Delicious first.
Although the effects of the jet lag didn’t put too many smiles on Joshua’s face and made him feel pretty lethargic, he was generally enthusiastic about bringing his experience to a British web apps event. “It’s great to hear other’s ideas. Events like this flesh out thoughts that are bandied about across web forums and stuff. Europe isn’t so different from the US, though, in its web development.”
Bigger and better
Delicious has come a long way in a short time, harking back to what web business was supposed to be like before the bubble burst. Buy-outs can be scary affairs, but Joshua is full of praise for how Yahoo! has conducted itself. “It’s gone very smoothly, and with other people coming in, it’s brought a bunch of new thoughts and appetites for what we were doing.”
Although Delicious has made Joshua a wealthy man, the dream is far from over. “Nobody knows where it will end, but we’ll keep adding features that we believe will make it bigger and better. We’ll continue to test widely because you can be really feature-rich but have a bunch of things that don’t actually do that much.” Joshua says that the whole tagging thing has only just begun, and indicates that how Delicious groups stuff in the future will be different from today. “We could grow Delicious into something that stores, categorises and shares all aspects of your digital life. As long as people use it, we’ve done a good job.”
Dozens of Delicious add-ons have appeared over the years, a testament to how users want to see the program evolve. They shouldn’t worry: Joshua is always listening to suggestions. “We are continually experimenting with how things should work, and ideas are always welcome – more so now than ever.”
Delicious is the social bookmarking tool of choice, but competitors are never far away. Plum (www.plum.com) and Ma.gnolia are just two takes on the Delicious idea, but Joshua isn’t too bothered. With Yahoo!’s millions behind him, and a dedicated team of Silicon Valley’s finest programmers, who wouldn’t be?
