Straight from the Del.icio.us blog:

del.icio.us users discover interesting things on the Web every day. We want to make it easier for you to find and connect to these people, so that you can benefit from their knowledge and they can benefit from yours. Today the "inbox" feature lets you subscribe to other users' bookmarks, but most people don't know about it and it's not terribly easy to use in your everyday life.

To make sharing easier, we've just released a new feature called "your network". You can add other del.icio.us users to your network either by visiting their del.icio.us pages or from the your network page itself. Once someone is in your network, you can keep track of their latest saved public bookmarks. And when you save new bookmarks you can easily share them with people in your network just by clicking on their username.

Your network replaces the user subscriptions functionality previously offered by the "inbox". If you had any existing user subscriptions in your inbox we automatically moved them over to your network, so you haven't lost any connections you already had.

I used the inbox casually. Sooz started tagging things for my inbox. However, it makes a lot more sense for me to see everything that Sooz thinks is worth bookmarking. I could have done that before. But, this makes it a bit easier.

Social networking around objects seems a lot more useful to me. Rather than social networking by making explicit connections with others.