Joshua Schachter could never have predicted how successful his creation would become. Although he doesn’t curse the explosion of tagging, or the cash Yahoo! was prepared to pay for it, he’s pretty worn out by his rise to web stardom.

As we walk along Kensington High Street, the strain of jet lag is obvious on Joshua’s face as he fights off the fatigue and adjusts to being in London. Joshua is no stranger to the city, having worked here for a while, but it’s a far cry from the relative peace of his new home in sun-drenched California. He has brought something of the West Coast cool with him, having launched in to his speech on ‘things we have learned’ at the Future of Web Apps summit. A
few hours earlier, he’d confessed: “This is just a jumble of stuff that occurred to me.” All the same, he was met by the rapturous applause of a hugely appreciative audience, which must have seemed all the more daunting when hundreds of laptop lids flipped open as soon as he took the stage.

“CSS and rendering issues will drive you nuts,” were his first pearls of wisdom. He should know. Joshua single-handedly brought Delicious to life with endless hours of trial and error. Plenty of chuckles emanated from the audience, but all were poised on the edge of their seats to hear how exactly Joshua arrived at the bookmarking phenomenon Delicious. And well they might: he sold it to Yahoo! for around $30 million (£17.5 million).

It’s all in a name

The world knows Delicious as ‘del.icio.us’, but Joshua admits he isn’t too fond of that style for writing the name, and says he chose in the first place simply because he thought it was funny. Joshua also says that, in retrospect, he probably should have kept the original Muxway name. “It’s easier to figure out where the dots go,” he says.

In less than three years, Joshua has come from being a Wall Street trader to one of the web’s bestknown names, and it all started with the humble bookmark– hardly anything revolutionary to the web. “I was looking for a way to save and manage my bookmarks better. The browser is fine for single...

The world knows Delicious as ‘del.icio.us’, but Joshua admits he isn’t too fond of that style for writing the name, and says he chose in the first place simply because he thought it was funny. Joshua also says that, in retrospect, he probably should have kept the original Muxway.