Sample URL	BookmarkSync Users (# of users bookmarking site vs. total user count)		del.icio.us Users (# of their users bookmark the site)	vs BMS (Ratio of their users bookmarking site vs. ours)	View Current Stats
	Count	% Total Users	Count	% of BMS Users	BookmarkSync	del.icio.us
mediapost.com	48	0.22%	245	510.42%
clickz.com	272	1.26%	901	331.25%
imdb.com	3255	15.04%	10446	320.92%
snopes.com	1323	6.11%	4135	312.55%
npr.org	1197	5.53%	2817	235.34%
nytimes.com	4173	19.28%	8197	196.43%
news.google.com	4155	19.19%	5825	140.19%
cnn.com	6971	32.20%	9291	133.28%
loc.gov	949	4.38%	1124	118.44%
latimes.com	2250	10.39%	2307	102.53%
ebay.com	4274	19.74%	4336	101.45%
si.edu	1282	5.92%	1252	97.66%
tomshardware.com	2868	13.25%	2754	96.03%
orbitz.com	1886	8.71%	1581	83.83%
webmd.com	1750	8.08%	1456	83.20%
dictionary.reference.com	7534	34.80%	5961	79.12%
turbotax.com	107	0.49%	84	78.50%
bloomberg.com	794	3.67%	586	73.80%
fool.com	1884	8.70%	1364	72.40%
scriptsearch.com	412	1.90%	291	70.63%
monster.com	2439	11.27%	1683	69.00%
pricewatch.com	3536	16.33%	2349	66.43%
smartmoney.com	1193	5.51%	692	58.01%
whitehouse.gov	920	4.25%	522	56.74%
edmunds.com	1687	7.79%	945	56.02%
mapquest.com	5738	26.51%	3171	55.26%
astalavista.box.sk	3116	14.39%	1718	55.13%
travelocity.com	3881	17.93%	2061	53.10%
altavista.com	3526	16.29%	1861	52.78%
kbb.com	1738	8.03%	888	51.09%
carfax.com	294	1.36%	142	48.30%
motorcycle.com	146	0.67%	58	39.73%
tucows.com	3754	17.34%	1487	39.61%
napster.com	963	4.45%	371	38.53%
aarp.org	711	3.28%	251	35.30%
medicare.gov	395	1.82%	136	34.43%
seniordiscounts.com	55	0.25%	15	27.27%
free-backgrounds.com	55	0.25%	14	25.45%
ired.com	187	0.86%	35	18.72%
thirdage.com	624	2.88%	89	0.16%
dilby.com	40	0.18%	17	0.00%
ssa.gov	874	4.04%	244	0.00%
elderweb.com	44	0.20%	7	0.00%
seniors-site.com	181	0.84%	2	0.00%
www.craigslist.org	1680	7.76%	1905	113.39%
seattle.craigslist.org	92	0.43%	527	572.83%
newyork.craigslist.org	278	1.28%	1049	377.34%
losangeles.craigslist.org	144	0.67%	588	408.33%
toronto.craigslist.org	34	0.16%	388	1141.18%
sfbay.craigslist.org	72	0.33%	924	1283.33%
democrats.org	57	0.20%	229	401.75%
dnc.org	5	0.02%	11	220.00%
rnc.org	116	0.41%	66	56.90%
gop.com	62	0.22%	91	146.77%
linux.org	814	2.89%	1229	150.98%
apple.com	2800	9.95%	5859	209.25%
microsoft.com	3452	12.27%	1148	33.26%
Data results from 18,748,063 user bookmarks online as of 04/12/07 You can also check individual URL's on del.icio.us using this link

 

It's not really 'social' if the population is skewed.

The data indicates that del.icio.us users like to bookmark 'News' & 'Media' centric sites like there's no tomorrow, and they don't bookmark senior or elderly related sites much at all when compared to BookmarkSync. How could this be if the population was balanced and the sample set included hundreds of thousands of users? I thought 'social bookmarking' was the next big thing, the folksonomy doesn't lie and we are all going to be doing this tagging stuff. Well, it seems that the active users of del.icio.us may be overloaded by media types. Could it be that del.icio.us is over represented by a comparatively small group of common minded 'bloggers' and media folks? Although these folks truly believe in the concept, could it be that they don't represent the general population in their bookmarking habits? It appears to be so. There are probably many more insights to be gleaned from a larger sample set, yet these numbers are intriguing and tend to betray del.icio.us as an unrepresentative and over-hyped social vehicle. It looks like John C. Dvorak may have been on to something in PC World's "To tag or not to tag, That is the question" back in May of 2005:

"The current fave sites amongst the cognoscenti have adopted the idea of public tags, and a number of influential bloggers have jumped on board pumping up the concept and re-promoting that old rusty saw, 'the semantic Web' "

"...The influential bloggers should be defined here. These are people whom you've never heard of, but whom other influential A-list utopianist bloggers all know. I reckon there are about 500 of them. He (or she) influences other like-minded bloggers, creating a groupthink form of critical mass, just like atomic fission, as they bounce off each other with repetitive cross-links: trackback links, self-congratulatory links, confirmations, and praise-for-their-genius links. BOOM! You get a formidable explosion—an A-bomb of groupthink."

An Explanation for the numbers

A very surprising piece of data was the total number of bookmarks required to arrive at these numbers. BookmarkSync's user bookmark counts and resultant data sample set results from a user database of 28,141 registered users (as of 04/11/07). It should be impossible for BookmarkSync to have anywhere near the number of active users bookmarking individual sites that del.icio.us has with its supposed registered user base at least 10 times the size of BookmarkSync's? Yet there it is. BookmarkSync has more users bookmarking Travelocity.com, a substantial and well respected travel site, than does del.icio.us. Unbelievable.

Or is it?

There are really only two possibilities. Either del.icio.us doesn't have 300k+ active users, or their users only bookmark a fraction of the number of sites that BookmarkSync users do. The real answer is probably a combination of both factors. BookmarkSync's technology lends itself to allowing users to easily upload several year's worth of bookmarking activity in just a moment or two. Even though the tools exist to upload your local bookmarks to del.icio.us, it appears that their users tend to build their bookmark collections at a more modest rate. (It could also be that their internal calculations are just grossly inaccurate and they will correct the error after they become aware of it.)

But del.icio.us is huge I tell you! HUGE!

Del.icio.us's Alexa traffic ranking is significantly higher than BookmarkSync's, so their traffic is real. Del.icio.us's traffic rank was 173 today and ours has never broken 100,000, they are in a completely different class than BookmarkSync! (Your traffic would be fantastic too if you had Yahoo marketing for you across their vast collection of domains.) That's not the point. The point is that their active user base, as indicated by the statistics, is actually not huge after all and nearly equal to ours (around 20 million user bookmarks as of this writing.) Additionally, it's skewed and not representative of the average population. Web-based social bookmarking is not the most efficient way to assemble user bookmarking data trends. (To gather significant and accurate statistics, you need to examine all of a user's bookmark collection, not just what they decide to send to your social site. That's why Google is offering 'free' syncing for Firefox by the way.)

As you can clearly see in the data above, BookmarkSync has more users bookmarking Tucows, Monster, and even the Whitehouse than del.icio.us does. This is really surprising and shouldn't be the case for a true 'socially' derived sample set of the size that del.icio.us claims to represent. As BookmarkSync users average nearly 700 bookmarks/user, del.icio.us users apparently average far fewer than that, perhaps only about 100 bookmarks/user. Apparently fewer than half of the actual users that created an account on del.icio.us actually use it.

Picking apart the numbers, one city at a time.

Here is another piece of data that was interesting and that bears further investigation. A very small sample of craigslist URL's reveals that a lot of social bookmarkers using del.icio.us seem also seem to favor the free-wheeling site that originated in San Francisco. Imagine that.

It also looks like they tend to prefer bookmarking Democratic web sites over their GOP counterparts, as well as favoring Linux and Mac sites over Redmond.

Did Yahoo get a good value for its $30 million?

Yahoo wouldn't have spent all that money on a gamble would they? I don't know; they apparently didn't see Google.com coming or the fortunes at stake in PPC marketing and they have been playing catch-up ever since. Maybe they really did spend nearly $100/user for del.icio.us. If my analysis holds up, they actually paid about $500/active user. Just in case there are other investors out there like Yahoo, BookmarkSync is officially on the sales block; the first bid submitted at $100/user gets it - lock, stock and server racks! - ($2,814,100 USD)

Conclusions?

These ratios reflect substantial demographic variations between BookmarkSync and del.icio.us users, something that shouldn't occur unless the populations are skewed. The bookmark user counts between the two sites simply shouldn't be so close to each other if the facts surrounding the size of del.icio.us are true. The information is available for any social site that reveals its actual user bookmark counts per URL, try it for yourself. I'm willing to provide internal database statistics to anyone interested in discovering more about this phenomenon. Just send me an email to "admin at sync2it.com".

This report and its data reflect a snapshot in time. Nobody would know if del.icio.us's bookmark count factor was bumped up a bit in the future to make the data more impressive. It was November 10th, 2004 when Google's database jumped from 4,285,199,774 webpages to 8,058,044,651 pages...overnight! They really could have flipped a switch and doubled their size overnight, or they could have simply made it up, it doesn't matter. It delivered the coup de grâce to every other search engine that had the audicity to publish their database stats on their homepage. No one does it now, Google won.

No matter what Yahoo does with del.icio.us's bookmark totals, the ratios between different sites and the user bookmark counts reveal a wealth of information about the health of social bookmarking, if anyone has the interest and takes the time to look.

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Note: You can click on the green and red squares to compare today's numbers to the values recorded on the snapshot date. Individual site statistics appear to 'bounce' around a bit on del.icious. For instance, checking Tucows.com via this link, and this link show two different numbers that vary by around 30% from each other. Again, that's just a minor issue, The main point is that BookmarkSync has more than 3,700 users bookmarking tucows.com today and del.icio.us should have ten times that! They should have nearly 37,000 users bookmarking the site and they only have 1,975!

Something's rotten in Sunnyvale...

 

Update 4/14/07 - Their blog reports that they have 2 million registered users now. Maybe so. That must include a large number of inactive accounts and apparently a large number of accounts with very little activity. Their bookmark database is still similar in size to ours, based upon individual site bookmarking statistics. Or do you believe that out of a sample set of 2 million people, only 1387 of them are bookmarking The Motley Fool website? I'm nonplussed!