A warning sign that you might be in for a bad user experience. Opening the Windows Vista box

It appears that my del.icio.us posts might come to a screeching halt now that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo!

I thought it was bad when Yahoo! bought Flickr and then del.icio.us but to their credit, Yahoo! let my two favorite sites carry on, mostly as they were. I can only imagine what a nutcase like Balmer would do once he gets his sweaty hands on them.

Time will tell but history tells us that they will cock this up much as they have done past acquisitions. Microsoft is not a customer oriented company, they’re an enterprise company. They have a terrible record when it comes to customer service, customer privacy, and customer choice.

It’s not that I’m worried that the world is coming to an end, I just don’t like the idea.

I wish everyone used del.icio.us to share bookmarks. It’s such a great service that I’ve been thinking of doing a few posts on some of the more useful features.

I never understood why I might want to save my bookmarks online as the browser does a great job. However, once I discovered the del.icio.us extension for Firefox my eyes were opened to how easy it was to quickly save a bookmark for future reference. Bookmarks are saved and a tag is assigned to the link in order to categorize it. As with Flickr, it’s tagging that makes del.icio.us so powerful and easy to use.

Andrea and I send each other links and it’s great. See a site you think might be of interest to your buddy? Save it with the for:username tag and that person will see it on their personal del.icio.us page. Very handy and easier than sending an email.

So, take the above video as entry 1 in the del.icio.us series. To get started browse to the Popular page and get your feet wet. If you already use del.icio.us, send me your username and I’ll add you to my network.