Speaking of del.icio.us…

Del.icio.us have finally released their new <a href=“http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/bookmarks/quicktour” target=_blank”>Firefox extension. It deliv­ers even tighter integ­ra­tion than the pre­vi­ous one — which was quiet con­veni­ent itself! It goes so far as to pro­pose to replace the Fire­fox book­mark­ing sys­tem itself…and after a few days of use I have to say I am very impressed.
The first exten­sion provided two but­tons for del.icio.us. One that took you to your del.icio.us page and a second that provided a con­veni­ent pop-up win­dow that allowed you to tag the page you were brows­ing. The new exten­sion retains these func­tions (albeit in a remark­ably smoother and more aes­thet­ic­ally pleas­ing man­ner) and goes a step fur­ther by adding a del.icio.us menu and new menubar.
When you install the new exten­sion, you are promp­ted to add your exist­ing Fire­fox book­marks to your del-icio.us account. Hav­ing done this when I installed the old exten­sion months ago, I was loathe to end up with duplic­ates, so avoided this step. I do wish that I could have done this as I have been run­ning the two sys­tems in par­al­lel for the past few months and most things have ended up in del.icio.us, but a few have been con­fined to Fire­fox only. Not a big deal.
I am par­tic­u­larly fond of the pop-out menu that lists your cat­egory tags. You can browse down and imme­di­ately see the pages which are tagged with each. An awe­some addi­tion. Addi­tion­ally, the menubar con­veni­ently provides your last few tagged pages as imme­di­ate clicks, and the menu allows you all the con­trol you could desire over your book­marks. Con­veni­ence is the name of the game with the new exten­sion. There seems to be mul­tiple ways in which your most pop­u­lar, most fre­quent or most recent tagged pages are made imme­di­ately access­ible.
With the new exten­sion, you now can eas­ily have all your book­marks instantly syn­chron­ized between any browser on any machine that you use. You have instant access to your book­marks hand­ily sor­ted regard­less of the quant­ity and with hav­ing to struggle through manual organ­iz­a­tion via the Fire­fox book­mark­ing system.

Update: Impress­ive. I tried to add a book­mark to my Fire­fox book­marks today, only to dis­cover that del.icio.us was watch­ing. It asked me if I wanted to add the mark to my del.icio.us col­lec­tion as well. I was offered the chance to keep being asked should I try to sub­vert del.icio.us in the future. I am actu­ally impressed at the immer­sion of the track­ing exten­sion into my sys­tem, although one is reminded of how much of what I do is increas­ingly tracked by all the little ‘ser­vices’ to which I sub­scribe.