Facebook has "My Shares," takes a jab at del.icio.us

[Image: facebook logo]After I noticed that Fred Wilson has a cool little “Facebook tag” on his sidebar, I went poking around in my Facebook profile to see where he nabbed it from, since it would make a pretty cool addition to my sidebar.

In the process, I stumbled across Facebook’s “My Shares” feature. I don’t really know when they introduced it, but here’s some of the copy they have explaining what it is:

The My Shares page keeps track of what has been shared with you, what you have sent to friends, and what you have posted to your profile. Sending something to specific friends is completely private, just like messaging. Any comments that your friends make about a shared item will be visible to all recipients of that item.

Translation: look out del.icio.us.

Facebook is offering to store and share cool links with people just the way del.ico.us does, except their emphasis is on “sharing” the links, which is something that I think del.icio.us hasn’t emphasized enough. Part of the problem is that the del.icio.us page design doesn’t necessarily lend itself to link sharing, and very few people probably have a RSS feed of their “links for you” page.

I think that if the My Shares feature of Facebook takes off, which it very well might, it could really take a chunk out of the del.icio.us business, because while saving links is useful, saving & sharing links is a lot more fun, and the Facebook service is built on top of an already existing network of friends who are fundamentally interested in sharing things with each other.

It also has the potential of taking a (groundbreaking) “web 2.0” service far more mainstream. People get Facebook, and they’re much more likely to start using a bookmarking service built into something they already understand.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and how else Facebook tries to expand its borders.