Since I discovered the social bookmarking site del.icio.us about three months ago, the way I surf and work on the web has been completely changed. Even now, as I am on my vacation and using a public hotel computer, I bookmarked several lifehacker posts to del.icio.us this evening, and previously I would have copied and pasted all the URLs in a email to myself--and most likely visit the same pages weeks later.
Del.ico.us allows me to "bookmark" any site and add it to my public page. This way I can easily access a site I previously saved from any computer, no need to try and synchronize my Firefox bookmarks or implement some other workaround. This can be a lifesaver when using a public computer and you don't have access to the Firefox bookmarks on your personal computer.
After discovering del.icio.us, I've been able to tremendously clean up my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar to the point where I only have 10 or 15 bookmarks to frequent sites, rather than several hundred bookmarked sites to trudge through. If you get into social bookmarking, seriously consider saving all your bookmarks into your account (this can be done quickly through importing and exporting).
On an average day, especially when browsing Lifehacker or PC Magazine, I save about 10 or more individual pages to del.icio.us. These might be articles I want to read again, share with friends, or simply use as a reference months or weeks from now. Now hardly a day goes by that I don't add a site to del.icio.us.
The beauty of social bookmarking lies in the "tags". I have a weekly tag for sites that I want to visit regularly, a "reading" tag for pages I want to go back and read the content if I only had a chance to scan it before saving the page. If I'm doing a research project for school, I'll simply create a new tag, eg: "biology-research", and then assign every page for the project to that tag, soI'll have an easy way to go back and visit the sites, and I'll be able to build a bibliography without copying and pasting the URLs until the end. Any page that I want to share with someone later has been given a "share" tag.
Another bonus to the social bookmarking idea is that you can see others who have saved the same pages you have, discover people with similar interests, and browse other users' bookmarks, etc.
If you use Firefox, and you should be, check out the Del.icio.us Buttons extension that integrates right next to the home button on the toolbar and will allow you to open a save box with one click or go to your del.icio.us page instantly.
Also see: What can I use del.icio.us for?
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