It's been a busy few months for the del.icio.us team -- building new features, scaling-up our infrastructure to meet growing demand, and working with our Yahoo! and MyWeb colleagues to share ideas and integrate our technologies. We hope you like what you've seen so far, and our thanks to all of you who use and enjoy del.icio.us. We wanted to take a moment and fill you in on our latest thoughts and tinkering.

del.icio.us started out as a tool for helping you remember interesting things you find on the Web, but it quickly grew into something more: a unique online community where the actions of individuals provide very real and immediate benefits to others. When you use del.icio.us to bookmark and tag a Web page, you're also automatically helping other people find that page, and you're also contributing to a cooperative effort to make the Web more understandable.

As the del.icio.us community has grown, what we've found is that it's not just the bookmarks that are interesting ? it's the people, too. del.icio.us is filling up with people who are building collections of really interesting, relevant, timely links on a huge range of subjects. These people and their collections are every bit as interesting as the links themselves. Imagine if you could find these people as easily as you find links by searching del.icio.us or the Web.

Lately, we've really started to explore the possibilities. You may have seen the news about the network feature we launched a few months back, which lets you connect to other del.icio.us users. Today we're taking things a step further. We?ve just rolled out a new network badge that makes it easy to tell people about your network from your own Web site or blog. It also gives your readers a fast and easy way to add you to their own networks. This lets del.icio.us users start using their network as a kind of online reputation, and it nicely complements our existing tagrolls and linkrolls. As of today we are also supplementing our typical tag suggestions with suggested users. Now when you visit the page for any active tag (for example, /popular/news), you will see a list of "active users" who are the people who are saving the most links using that tag.

Between these two features, we are continuing our efforts to make people and connections more central to the del.icio.us experience. We have quite a bit more planned in this regard, so stay tuned and keep letting us know what you think.

Joshua Schachter and the del.icio.us team