I remember when I first met Joshua Schachter. It was in our first office back in early 2005 and he was still working at Morgan Stanley and running Delicious out of a server in his closet. I was immediately struck by the way Joshua looked for lightweight simple ways to do things. He told me that reduction was the key to getting something right.
Delicious was so simple to use. It didn't do much. But what it did do, it did well. I once asked Joshua why he didn't let users rate links. He said "we do. if they post it to Delicious they are ranking it as interesting. if they don't post it to Delicious, they are ranking it as not interesting". That's classic Joshua.
Skills.to is also classic Joshua. For those who haven't seen it, skills.to is a super simple lightweight way to tag people. It currently leverages the Twitter name space to find people, tag them, and tweet out the tags. You can also tweet out to your followers that you'd like them to come tag you. That's about it. Delicious for people.
There's a chrome extension that allows you to see people's tags in line in Twitter. I just installed that so I haven't had much experience with it yet. But I like the idea of a super lightweight people tagging system that is transportable across the web. I hope this takes off. Joshua is the right person to build it.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Full disclosure. USV is an investor in Tasty Labs which has built Jig and Skills.to.
