Update on 12/18/2010: I've updated the tool to handle the V2 Delicious API.

I've written a simple script/site that lets you import your del.icio.us bookmarks into Google's bookmarks feature (which doesn't seem to have a product name - oh, right):

http://persistent.info/delicious2google/

Technical Details

For a while now, Kushal* had been wanting a way to import his del.icio.us bookmarks into Google. There are some advantages to this, including the fact that your tags labels show up in search results if they contained a bookmarked site and one-click Toolbar access. It was pointed out to me that the bookmarks site has a POST/XML-based bulk import interface that the Google Toolbar uses to import IE Favorites. I initially thought that I could use del.icio.us's JSON API to get the list of bookmarks, thus having a completely client-side solution that did not require the user to hand over his/her credentials. Unfortunately that turned out to be limited to 100 posts. Hack-ish workarounds came to mind, like getting the list of tags first and then getting the bookmarks for a particular tag (still wouldn't work if there were more than 100 bookmarks for a single tag). I abandoned that approach, but for the sake of posterity, that version is archived here.

Since del.icio.us also has a REST API that allows full access to data, my next thought was to use that. pydelicious is a pretty simple to use Python library for accessing the API, and it was easy to create a script that used it to fetch the list of bookmarks for a user. Since I already had the code from my previous attempt that took the JSON output and uploaded it, I merely made the Python code output similar JSON and used the same upload method.

This approach seems to work pretty well, but it has the caveat that the user has to enter their username and password into a third-party site. I've provided the source code so that the paranoid can run their own copy. While the Google bookmarks site doesn't have an API per se, it does export its data as RSS feeds thus this does not have to be a one-way transfer; an enterprising hacker could write an importer in the other direction.

* His newly-released luxur(n)y site is interesting if you're in the market for a NYC luxury rental.

The new version of Reader has been out there long enough (and is now stable enough) that I have some time to catch my breath and make this post (my post-launch post last year came only a couple of days after the big announcement). I've jotted down some of my thoughts from the past few weeks, continuity will not be high.

There were some hints that something big was coming. Chris's Twitter updates were sounding rather intense. Someone in the discussion group inferred from my lack of posts that a major update was imminent (or that I stopped caring - never!). We even invited some bloggers for a sneak peek at the new Reader* but they were nice and respected their embargo.

Reader is in Google Labs, and that puts it in the "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" product family. I'm glad that people seem to have realized that this "throwing" and "seeing" are less passive than they sound. To stretch this metaphor further, if the spaghetti starts to slide off, engineers (and UI designers, and product managers, and others) will study the problem and figure out how to increase its coefficient of friction. Usually the changes are more subtle (witness the myriad of tweaks that have been done to the Google Video homepage) which is perhaps why there is this perception that no post-launch changes are made.

A lot of people have remarked on the similarities between the new Reader interface and Gmail's. With this in mind, I've created a simple Greasemonkey script that adds a "Feeds" in Gmail. When clicked, Reader's list view is loaded on the right. To install the script (and Greasemonkey if you have never used it before):

1. Install Greasemonkey from http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
2. Restart Firefox.
3. Click on the script link above
4. Click on the "Install" button that's displayed in the upper-right corner of the page.
5. Visit/reload Gmail

You may wonder why I felt the need to write a Greasemonkey script for my own product. The answer is that integrations are hard and generally require a lot of effort before you can even determine if they are worthwhile. Greasemonkey lets you experiment with UI concepts with minimal effort necessary from either team (I had to make exactly one change to Reader to better support this script, and that was the ability to force list view to be used, even if expanded view is normally selected). I can't really say what, if any, our integration plans are, but enough users have asked for something like this that I thought writing the script was the most expedient way to provide this (unofficial) feature.

I am still subscribed to the "google reader" Blog Search feed, so that is one way to reach the team with feedback. The discussion group is also being monitored, though with the increased volume we now find it hard to respond to a lot of posts. But please keep the feedback coming, it's been great to get direct, concrete indicators for what we should work on next.

* It is rather frustrating to have to call it "the new Reader" or more formally "the new version of Google Reader." It's unfortunate that version numbers are passé, "2.0.1" is a more accurate and concise representation where of where Reader is right now.