Scuttle, but…
now what are the possibilities?
On one of the listserves that comes through my email, someone asked about social bookmarking software that can be installed on your own server. Of course, with del.icio.us, you are stuck with their servers, which is great for two reasons: 1) I do not have to worry about doing something to the server and losing the bookmarks and 2) it allows for a large community of bookmarking. However, this could turn out unfavorably because I then do have to worry about the del.icio.us server being down or getting messed up.
Another listserve member recommended scuttle, which has a site where you can sign up for an account in a similar fashion to del.icio.us (although it took a little while for the confirmation email to come through). Because it is open source, you can also download the installation files, which I have not tried yet.
There are some noticeable difference between the functionality of scuttle and del.cio.us. Scuttle doesn’t list all the tags along the side, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as my list is a little unmanageably and overwhelmingly long and instead offers a bookmark search at the top. It relies on a tag cloud along the side to identify the most popular tags. It limits the number of bookmarks on the page to about ten, as opposed to del.icio.us, where I can choose whether I want to see 10, 25, 50, or 100 at once. These are all cosmetic issues, really, but they do affect usability. Importing del.icio.us bookmarks into scuttle was ridiculously easy. I’m not sure how it works the other way around, but it should be fairly easy given that they are using the same API.
Overall the major disadvantage that I see to scuttle use on the scuttle server is that it does not have the networking functionality that del.icio.us has. I have gotten used to adding people to my “network” on del.icio.us and sending them links there (I wish there were a search feature to find users on del.icio.us!!!).
Of course, with a little research, I can see the scuttle/del.icio.us issue isn’t new and that the others have already thought of ways to cross-use the two services to as to leverage the advantage of the fact that scuttle and del.icio.us are so compatible, including creating code to sync the two and creating code for cross-posting (although both of these posts are a little out of date and thus are work done on earlier versions of scuttle).