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Less than a week after the service’s third birthday, social bookmarking service del.icio.us has announced an important milestone on its blog:

…del.icio.us has just passed the mark of 1 million registered users! That’s more than triple the number of users we had just nine months ago. We can hardly believe it ourselves (although the smell of smoke coming from the server rack seems to eerily confirm it). Thanks to each and every one of you for making all this possible.

This figure comes as a surprise. Just over a week ago, Alex Iskold wrote a very interesting comparative review of social bookmarking sites at the Read/Write Web site. He assumed, reasonably enough, based on the service’s figures at the time it was acquired by Yahoo, plus moderate growth, that del.icio.us had half this number of users.

But, no. They’ve got a million. The many other services in this sector appear to have between 5000-40,000 users, making del.icio.us the very clear leader.

Congratulations, of course. But what on earth has made del.icio.us the leader of the pack? It offers considerably fewer features than newer competitors such as Yahoo My Web, diigo and RawSugar. It also looks incredibly drab compared to ermm… everybody else in this sector, perhaps especially the very pretty Ma.gnolia. It’s restrictive about the tags you use - they have to be one word. There are no groups, and there’s no way to communicate with other users, reducing the ’social’ side of the software to the networks feature.

Here are four and a half thoughts about why they’ve won so much of the market.

1) Ugly works. People seem to trust ugly apps. Ugly can mean an emphasis on functionality rather than upon the veneer. Look at Craigslist, MySpace and Google. The do OK, don’t they? The Vitamin blog quotes Apple’s Steve Jobs talking about the idea of design in 2003:

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… People think it’s this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

2) Del.icio.us works. It doesn’t fall down under server strain. It doesn’t lose all your bookmarks. (Hell, I have to back them up now I’ve said that). And it is fast. The firefox extension works better and more reliably than any of the toolbars and bookmarklets from rival services.

3) Interoperability. Every new service in this space can import your del.icio.us bookmarks. This might be seen as a weakness - almost encouraging users to migrate. But it actually keeps users loyal. Knowing that the delicious bookmarks format has become the de-facto industry standard means that you’re a lot less likely to use a service that doesn’t offer this compatibility. Yes, you might flirt with others’ but del.icio.us know you’ll always come home again.

4) Social Capital. Being three years old is pretty mature compared to many Web 2.0 apps. Your friends and contacts probably use del.icio.us if they use any of these services. Want to share bookmarks with them? Tell them your del.icio.us username. It’s akin to the difficulty of breaking free from MySpace. If your friends are on there, then it doesn’t really matter that, say, TagWorld looks a lot nicer. The reverse side of this is that we don’t know how many of those million users still use del.icio.us or have actually moved on to a rival service. You wouldn’t delete your account if you did that, would you?

5) Popularity. Similar to point 4, but if you want to use the search or popular features on your social bookmarking site, then there needs to be a lot of people contributing links. A million members are going to stand a higher chance of contributing good things than a thousand people, unless there were some method of hand-picking that thousand. For similar reasons, spam doesn’t seem as intrusive on del.icio.us as it is on other social bookmarking sites - because you need a hundred fake accounts to hit the popular page, as opposed to 10 on less popular sites.

Two bonus tips. Pimp your del.ico.us using delicious director, or these Greasemonkey scripts