Delicious built a tool, seeking to build a library of bookmarks. Its 5 million user base, doesn't prove very much. However, Wikipedia sought to create a library of books and its insane success informs us that, the model is quite potent.
There are about 181 million blogs, whereas there are over 2 billion users sharing content in Facebook. This informs us, that sharing content trumps creating new content.
Why did Wikipedia succeed, while the Delicious Model didn't.? The short answer is focus. While Wikipedia creates an environment for progressively creating content or parts of content, there is no such innate discipline in Delicious, I can create content, as and when I want and thus, after a while, I as the user, doesn't see the payoff, just like bogs. If there is not enough traffic, you eventually give up blogging.
However, wikipedia is everyone's blog library, where some folks decide what topic is worthy and start writing the initial sketch and others review and refine the content, if the topic interests them.
Delicious would have been successful, if I knew that, somebody else is interested in the topic that I bookmarked and others added more bookmarks to the same topic. There needs to be a common thread to begin with and folksonomy isn't enough for me to keep up my interest.
Pinterest, however is successful, due to its resemblance to Flickr rather than to Delicious. There is still a need to build a wikipedia of bookmarks without the need for an army of volunteers and generate the wikipedia of bookmarks, for each topic, while helping users search more efficiently.
One might ask, why do you need yet another search engine. Search engines help search noun and not verbs. Stay tuned for 6things, as it rebuilds its toolset.
…and then you can search for insights, not merely web pages.
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