So, del.icio.us is great. I mean, it’s really great. But I’m getting tired of how slowly it accomplishes simple tasks, like searching my existing bookmarks, and I’m beginning to wonder if the social aspect of the software is slowing it down. I’m sure the del.icio.us service has a lot of users. The tables in its database must be pretty huge by now.

I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t be better to have my own personal del.icio.us running on my hosting machine. This wouldn’t necessarily mean giving up on the social-software features of del.icio.us - my personal bookmark-tagging software could upload its links to my del.icio.us account in the background. And it might be faster, and it might not go down for hours at a time to “rebuild the database”, leaving me feeling crippled. And it might allow me to create private bookmarks. By “private” I don’t merely mean “visible only to me”… I mean “the data is not sitting on some drive owned by Yahoo, so I know for certain that it won’t be turned over to the Chinese government without my consent.”

This privacy thing could be a big deal. Another example: Unlike some geeks, I have refused to jump on the Gmail bandwagon, even though everyone talks about how great Gmail is. (The Ajax interface! The tags! The searching!) I’m just not interested in helping Google compile a complete dossier on me. It’s not that I’m convinced that they’re eventually going to do evil things with my personal information… but it’s better not to give them the chance. It’s bad enough that they’ve logged every search term I’ve ever typed, and every link on a Google page that I’ve ever clicked, and tagged them with my IP address.

So the open source world needs to clone Gmail as well, so I can install that on my personal server right next to clone.icio.us. Never let it be said that there’s not enough projects to keep everyone busy…