Mmmmm, delicious.

September 27, 2011 7:23 AM

The new Delicious launched yesterday, after being sold off by Yahoo to AVOS, the guys that founded Youtube. New with the relaunch are stacks, or curated themed lists of links. Previously.
posted by monju_bosatsu (85 comments total)

The "stacks" make it seem more like Pinterest without the visual aspect. That being said, I love both Delicious and Pinterest for different reasons.
posted by sararah at 7:29 AM on September 27, 2011

Wow, I like the whole stacks thing. I might actually have to start using delicious again.
posted by desjardins at 7:36 AM on September 27, 2011

Yeah, does this mean everyone is migrating back?
posted by jadepearl at 7:39 AM on September 27, 2011

I left Delicious for pinboard and I'm not going back again. I just want to store bookmarks so the new features have no value for me.
posted by tommasz at 7:41 AM on September 27, 2011 [4 favorites]

I used to love delicious. Until today, in fact.

I'm not sure what they did, but they kinda ruined it. I (used to) track /tag/freeware almost everyday to find new software. It used to be pretty solid (or at least it was yesterday.) A few crap "FreeFiles" sites, but mostly new apps or updates (just yesterday I found OpenLP, DarkWave Studio, MindOnTrack, DVDStyler, SwiftRing, Ekahau WiFi HeatMapper, TeboCam ... a few more).

Now it's all SEO crap.

No recent links. No popular links.

And, of course, I got the email months ago and confirmed my approval to switch over all my old links and stuff, but ... my 3-4 accounts all seem to have been nuked. Or else I just can't find them yet ... were all the old links toasted?
posted by mrgrimm at 7:42 AM on September 27, 2011 [7 favorites]

I'm very disappointed in the new look

There is no way to view links in compact mode (I can only see 10 links per page), I don't see all of my tags, and links I have deleted weeks ago are back (and deleting then reloading brings them back) and, for some stupid reason, clicking on a tag a second time searches for tag1 + tag2 instead of displaying tag2 links

I'm also not sure why they had to release it when, according to their FAQ, a very large number of features isn't available yet.

I guess I'm going back to Pinboard
posted by Cloud King at 7:43 AM on September 27, 2011

Yeah, pretty ugly. And the profile pic stuff is totally broken.
posted by clvrmnky at 7:44 AM on September 27, 2011

I watched their video and now have switched from watching porn all day to looking at moustaches How great is that!
posted by Postroad at 7:45 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

In other "Cool web-based services people love" news...You now have to first have a Facebook account to get a Spotify account. WTF???
posted by Thorzdad at 7:49 AM on September 27, 2011

meh, searching by tag only gives you one page of bookmarks in that tag, even if you have 20 pages.

all my stuff is still there, it's just vexing to find.
posted by elizardbits at 7:50 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

hmm. "no user found with that username or email." for all my logins (which were all live yesterday). bummer.

oh wait, one account just worked. all my links seem to be there. hm. then i tried to log in again and got a 502 Bad Gateway error, so maybe i'll wait a few days.

still, doesn't look so great.

You also have to get a Facebook account to get a Turntable.fm account. !!!!!

(The cost of a Facebook account is nominal. I think you just need an email address to register.)
posted by mrgrimm at 7:51 AM on September 27, 2011

I hear good things about diigo but have not tried it.
Sadly, I thought I had until Sept 30 to transfer delicious bookmarks. Oops.
posted by pointystick at 7:56 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

You can hear fandom wailing about this from space. You can't see more than ten links for any tag, a ton of tags are missing, and any tags containing the / symbol are broken. Unless they fix a bunch of stuff fast, Delicious has gone from being one of the best places to look for fanfic to completely useless for fannish purposes.
posted by nonasuch at 8:00 AM on September 27, 2011 [5 favorites]

Fuck - they wiped out all my tags!
posted by KokuRyu at 8:01 AM on September 27, 2011

Eww, my tag list only seems to include tags that were not in a bundle so I'm left with a list of only the weird and wonky tags that I hadn't managed to categorise.
posted by Ness at 8:03 AM on September 27, 2011

Yeah, I'm just watching fandom collapse in on itself about this. It's enough to make a girl learn how to code or something.
posted by Mizu at 8:03 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

The "Settings" page doesn't feature any settings.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:03 AM on September 27, 2011

Ugh. Wow, is this broken. :(
posted by zarq at 8:04 AM on September 27, 2011

Is this the thread where we hate on the new product for not being perfect? Strangle that baby in the crib! Launches are rough, look at it again in a month.

The old delicious was a disaster of a product with some really great data. Me, I jumped ship to Pinboard and couldn't be happier. It's the same simple tagged bookmark product that was a disaster for Yahoo, but recast as a small for pay service that makes perfect sense as a lifestyle business. And it delivers great. It's fast, it has nice search, it's awesome.

AVOS' Delicious is something different, trying to reinvent the Yahoo vision of Delicious as some giant megaportal for curated content. I'm not very interested in that kind of thing. But I'm excited to see them give it a shot.

They seem to have lost all 4000 of my bookmarks. I only approved the transfer on the last day, maybe it'll still show up.
posted by Nelson at 8:05 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

I only use it for the bookmark manager that works with firefox.

...Which now no longer seems to want to work. (It says I need to log onto delicious in order to view the properties on them, which I did, but it still doesn't work. Lame)
posted by delmoi at 8:05 AM on September 27, 2011

Is this the thread where we hate on the new product for not being perfect? Strangle that baby in the crib! Launches are rough, look at it again in a month.

What new product? They took a product that worked, changed bookmarks to "links", added some web2.0 garbage and removed a lot of useful functionality.

Not to mention they could have beta tested it and not completely replaced a working product with a broken one
posted by Cloud King at 8:06 AM on September 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

I, too, switched to Pinboard (actually deleted my Delicious account after Yahoo sold it). I guess I like that new Delicious is trying something new, but it's going to take a lot to get me back over there.

(The cost of a Facebook account is nominal. I think you just need an email address to register.)

It's only nominal if you don't mind being tracked by facebook.
posted by 6550 at 8:06 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Nelson: "Is this the thread where we hate on the new product for not being perfect? "

I'd like it to have retained the functionality of the previous version, at the very least.

They're setting themselves up for failure here. Prior customers will expect the site to be as useful as the old Delicious. If it isn't, they'll be dissatisfied and perhaps walk away.

They had an old product that worked. This one doesn't. That's a serious problem.
posted by zarq at 8:07 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Which now no longer seems to want to work.

Mine was working fine until you said that. YOU MONSTER.
posted by elizardbits at 8:12 AM on September 27, 2011

Hmm. I was able to log in but it only seems to be showing me a small number of my bookmarks for some reason. I think it's only showing public links? I'm not really sure what the deals is, maybe I need to close firefox and restart it or something.

Anyway you can export your bookmarks here (this worked fine for me)

Anyway, what I'm wondering, I think I asked this before but are there any good bookmark managers you can both (1) run on your own server (so no one else has access to them) and (2) Integrate with the browser with an addon so that you can add links without visiting another site?

Bonus points if it can import bookmarks from the delicious dump.
posted by delmoi at 8:13 AM on September 27, 2011

If you thought the old Delicious worked, you haven't tried Pinboard. Seriously. The old Delicious 2.0 was slow and buggy and had broken search. Try the import to Pinboard and you'll have something just like the old Delicious but much, much better implemented. (With all due respect and love for Joshu. Sorry man).

I agree that the acquisition and migration has set up AVOS Delicious for failure. If you were expecting the old del.icio.us today, you're no doubt going to be very confused. And yeah, it'd be better if the new product worked better, no argument there. Give it time.
posted by Nelson at 8:19 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

"Is this the thread where we hate on the new product for not being perfect? "

Well, it's not a new product, it's a replacement. And one that a lot of people used to manager their bookmarks. Which means, that if it's less perfect then the old product its really going to mess up people's day.
posted by delmoi at 8:22 AM on September 27, 2011

And yeah, it'd be better if the new product worked better, no argument there. Give it time.

Well, the problem is that it doesn't work. I can't see all my tags, I can't permanently delete old links I have deleted in the past and the official Chrome extension won't load.
posted by Cloud King at 8:25 AM on September 27, 2011

Wow. That's all kinds of broken.
posted by Otis at 8:32 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

FWIW I have started using Diigo.com & their iPad browser (formerly known as iChromy). Aside from having a knack for silly names, I'm happy. Diigo supposedly has a features that automatically adds your new diigo bookmarks also to Delicious but I have found that to be, er, unreliable. Also, my bookmarking needs are real simple & and not social. Pinboard looked to me like it offered all kinds of power use I really don't need.

I just checked my "new" Delicious account and it is working. Not the Diigo cross bookmarking yet, but that can't be blamed on Delicious.
posted by chavenet at 8:34 AM on September 27, 2011

Launches are rough, look at it again in a month

They had an excellent, functional product to work with. This is a re-launch, not a launch.

trying to reinvent the Yahoo vision of Delicious as some giant megaportal for curated content

That's what Delicious already was!

diigo is certainly taking advantage:

Transition from Delicious to Diigo ~ Instruction & FAQ
posted by mrgrimm at 8:55 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

God this is all sorts of ruined.
posted by mrgrimm at 8:57 AM on September 27, 2011

My biggest hates are:

1 - Tags not listed alphabetically
2 - You can only see one page of content for the tag - there's no '1 2 3 4' at the bottom of the pages (although there is with the main page)
3 - Tags missing in the interface, although it you remember what they are the links are still there
4 - They don't have 24 hour live support on the day they unveiled the new site

It seems like they haven't lost the links - I still seem to have all of mine - so I'm hoping that they can fix all this stuff.

I do quite like the Stacks. But I want the old functionality back.
posted by DanCall at 8:58 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Pinterest

I had to Google this, because at first it looked like an adjective.

"Act One consisted of a single line of dialogue followed by a fifty-five minute pause. It was the Pinterest thing I'd ever seen."
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 9:02 AM on September 27, 2011 [5 favorites]

So the big reason for the "reboot" seems to be these stacky things. Funny that, since Delicious was the poster child for the move to freeform tagging back in the early 00's. Tags seem to have been slightly demoted.

I used to like going to Delicious.com and seeing trending links. Sometimes this gave me more insight than Twitter into what's going on with current events. Stacks might work, but you are no longer seeing trends, you are seeing text-less blog posts sorted by clickability.

Also the /tag/ search is broken now, which removes one of my secret weapons for search.

Stacks should have been a bolt-on feature, and the rest should have been left alone.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:08 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Stacks seem to be google bait to me.
posted by PenDevil at 9:18 AM on September 27, 2011

So suppose I ignored all those warnings and exhortations to have my bookmarks moved and now I can't even log in. Is there anyway I can get my old bookmarks or are they gone forever?
posted by callmejay at 9:22 AM on September 27, 2011

The thing about using Diigo/pingboard is that you're still placing your bookmarks in someone else's hands. Just like delicious, they could get bought, you don't know if that data is being data-mined, or what. It's kind of annoying.
posted by delmoi at 9:36 AM on September 27, 2011

-- Try to add link

-- "Sorry, invalid url"

-- uh, no it isn't
posted by dgaicun at 9:48 AM on September 27, 2011

Ok, yeah this is terrible now. Holding out hope that it will quit being terrible shortly.
posted by sararah at 9:51 AM on September 27, 2011

Delicious is where I stored all the links that I never bothered to get around to reading. So the new Delicious is still perfect for me.
posted by srboisvert at 9:55 AM on September 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

Why does it now have to "approve" my link first now anyway? If I wanted to add a fake link that's my business.
posted by dgaicun at 9:57 AM on September 27, 2011

They seem to have lost playtagger in the move. The only useful piece of javascript on the web.
posted by fartron at 10:22 AM on September 27, 2011

fartron: The only useful piece of javascript on the web.

Amusingly, I viewed this comment after clicking "1 new comment, show".
posted by gilrain at 10:31 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I'm one of those people in fandom who's wailing and gnashing her teeth. Waking up to a Delicious that just does not work anything at all like it should was not a pleasant surprise. I can't even find out how to view all of my tags! My tag bundles are gone! And this is a big one for fandom, any tag with a / in it doesn't work. D:

It basically looks like they've removed all the functionality I actually used, except for bookmarking things, which, y'know, I can do with my browser if nothing else on Delicious is going to work like it should. Did they just not beta test a single thing? It looks to me like just about everything is broken.
posted by yasaman at 10:32 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Is this the thread where we hate on the new product for not being perfect?

It deleted several years of my tags, making it impossible for me to search my bookmarks. What is the point of launching something that is completely useless? While I realize it is free, my data and "social graph", combined in aggregate with millions of other Delicious users, does have value for the company. So there is the expectation that the product will work.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:32 AM on September 27, 2011

So wait, which of the other options for bookmarking has an integrated browser one-click thingy like delicious used to? Is it pinboard? I hope it's pinboard.
posted by elizardbits at 10:42 AM on September 27, 2011

elizardbits: So wait, which of the other options for bookmarking has an integrated browser one-click thingy like delicious used to? Is it pinboard? I hope it's pinboard.

If what you mean by one-click thingy is what I think you mean, yes, it's Pinboard. Although, in fairness, the other contenders probably have one-click thingies too. (Choose Pinboard.)
posted by gilrain at 10:45 AM on September 27, 2011

It could be worse: Delicious could have rode off into the sunset and died entirely. At least AVOS launched *something*, rather than churn on it for months and months (like we did with 2.0) until they reached some theoretically satisfying subset of the original's feature set

AVOS had to rewrite the product, because the 2.0 re-launch (as opposed to the 1.0 acquired by Yahoo!) was based on a lot of in-house Y! search technology that was very unlikely to ever leave the premises, sale or no sale.

That said, I moved to http://pinboard.in/deusx last January, and won't be moving back.
posted by deusx at 11:04 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

I signed up for Pinboard and have all links fed there, but delicious was still my main default. I am willing to give these new people a week or two to iron out problems but color me unimpressed and annoyed.

-signing in doesn't keep me signed in
-bookmarklet only works sporadically and doesn't keep me signed in
-Where is my network - I only see a few people that I follow and none that follow me. My network page was one of the main things I used to surf new links.
-tons of tags are missing. And when I post a link, it doesn't give me a choice to pick from my -tags as I type them.
-10 links per page - totally lame
-Inability to set view to expanded or simple

Sucks. And I was a delicious junkie.
posted by madamjujujive at 11:04 AM on September 27, 2011

I get now why so many people are upset. Y'all thought that the New AVOS Delicious was somehow going to be like the old Delicious, only better. But that's not the plan and I think they were fairly transparent about that. They are building some new media portal thing that just happens to bootstrap off of existing Delicious data and the idea that tagged bookmarks are valuable data. So there's a bunch of disillusioned Delicious users who didn't spot the bait and switch coming. Sorry.

Seriously, if you like the old Delicious bookmark library, try Pinboard. It's terrific. Hopefully the Delicious export still works or you have a backup; Pinboard will import it very neatly. It doesn't have 100% of the features of Delicious 2.0: no tag bundles and limited support for multi-tag searches. But it has the core set of features and works very very well. It has some useful additional tricks, too, particularly the archival account feature.
posted by Nelson at 11:09 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I'm seconding a lot of people here by saying not impressed. At least it let me log in but when I go to tag view it won't show more than ten links. What is that. Plus the fact that everything is unnecessarily spaced out...and it doesn't show subcategories within a tag anymore...and, and, and. I know it's kind of unfeeling to nag on a new release, but if they don't fix this soon I'm going to be moving my bookmarks elsewhere. There's just...not a lot of functionality present now.
posted by clavier at 11:22 AM on September 27, 2011

Huh. I was all prepared to check it out and then come here ranting and raving about all the new changes, but it won't even let me log in. And the password reset emails don't work. Way to go, AVOS...
posted by badmoonrising at 11:25 AM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Hey, thanks for all the Pinboard love in this thread! In fairness I expect most of the delicious problems today to be temporary (lost data, feeds), but the whole episode illustrates a kind of paradox of online bookmarking: people want their stuff to stick around for years in some accessible format, but bookmarking sites themselves feel pressure to either grow or die, neither of which benefits users.

I don't want to hijack a thread that's not about me, but also happy to answer questions here.
posted by pinboard at 11:41 AM on September 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Their help page says that complaints about the New & Improved Delicious should go to [e-mail].
posted by twirlip at 11:47 AM on September 27, 2011

I'm another Delicious junkie, logging in was no problem, it seems to have saved all my (12,286!) bookmarks back to April 2005 but there do seem to be a few teething problems, the worst of which is that the quick bookmarking tool for Firefox is borked. If they can fix that quickly I'll remain a devotee.

pinboard - I was tempted to switch earlier in the year when Avos took over but one of the most important things for me is the ability to share bookmarks with specific people on delicious - do you have any plans to offer the ability to share urls?
posted by humph at 11:56 AM on September 27, 2011

are there any good bookmark managers you can both (1) run on your own server (so no one else has access to them)

There's unalog (source code is here), but I don't think it's being actively being maintained. Other than that, there isn't much out there, or there wasn't last time I checked. I've been thinking of writing something myself, because a distributed bookmark-sharing system would be an interesting project.
posted by twirlip at 12:00 PM on September 27, 2011

I don't want to hijack a thread that's not about me, but also happy to answer questions here.

Not really a question but a request, but I would love an option to change the clicked link and tag color. Orangeon a white background sticks out a little bit, I would really prefer blue/dark blue
posted by Cloud King at 12:04 PM on September 27, 2011

Cloud King:Not really a question but a request, but I would love an option to change the clicked link and tag color. Orangeon a white background sticks out a little bit, I would really prefer blue/dark blue

I know there are some Stylish themes for Pinboard. Not sure how complete/polished they are, though.
posted by gilrain at 12:09 PM on September 27, 2011

That said, I moved to http://pinboard.in/deusx last January, and won't be moving back.

Not Found

We could not find anything.

I guess it works a little different than del.icio.us did...

it won't even let me log in. And the password reset emails don't work. Way to go, AVOS...

Yeah, I'm pretty sure my main Yahoo account was toasted. Good thing my extensive collection of fetish links remained. I just exported them all into HTML ...

It could be worse: Delicious could have rode off into the sunset and died entirely.

That would have been better, because users could have planned and acted accordingly. (It's simple to migrate to diigo.)

But that's not the plan and I think they were fairly transparent about that.

They were certainly not transparent about it in the emails about authorizing the transfer of content.

Reasons to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks and account information
• Continue uninterrupted use of Delicious.
• Keep your Delicious username, account information, and all your bookmarks.
• Enjoy innovative new features that enhance your Delicious experience.

... but I guess that messaging was from Yahoo Delicious not (Evil) AVOS Delicious ... have I been following AVOS' press releases? No.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:16 PM on September 27, 2011

one of the most important things for me is the ability to share bookmarks with specific people on delicious

More importantly, share bookmarks with people who weren't registered with Delicious. I don't see how that's possible with Pinboard.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:17 PM on September 27, 2011

I would love an option to change the clicked link and tag color

I'm working on a way for people to upload custom stylesheets to the site. Many people absolutely hate the design, but everyone hates it in a different way, so that seems like the sanest solution.
posted by pinboard at 12:32 PM on September 27, 2011

share bookmarks with people who weren't registered with Delicious

I think all the viable alternatives - us, Diigo, Trunk.ly, Zootool - allow people to share their stuff with non-users via RSS, Javascript linkrolls, or plain old hyperlink. If you have specific concerns about how sharing works in Pinboard, I'd encourage you to chat me up offline.
posted by pinboard at 12:35 PM on September 27, 2011

The thing about using Diigo/pinboard is that you're still placing your bookmarks in someone else's hands.

I automatically back up all/most of my Pinboard* links to my blog via the RSS feed and the RSS Digest plugin for WordPress. Admittedly, that means I'm not backing up private (or unread?) links, but it's good enough for me for now.

I'm generally a belt-and-suspenders gal when it comes to web services; I've actually lost some data from my own site, back when I had very flaky web hosts, so for a long time I preferred to have someone else host stuff, but now I like to do both. I have Flickr, Twitter, Pinboard and Goodreads all fed into my blog. (Although now I notice I'm using two different RSS-reading plugins. WTF?)

* VERY happy Pinboard user, BTW. I should probably spring for archiving, given that I have just shy of 10,000 links saved.
posted by epersonae at 1:12 PM on September 27, 2011

Hey, thanks for all the Pinboard love in this thread! In fairness I expect most of the delicious problems today to be temporary (lost data, feeds), but the whole episode illustrates a kind of paradox of online bookmarking: people want their stuff to stick around for years in some accessible format, but bookmarking sites themselves feel pressure to either grow or die, neither of which benefits users.

Yes, but why do we need a 'service'? What's needed is a portable format plus an easy way to host it on the web on any server. Lots of people use dropbox now, which is just generic file hosting.
posted by delmoi at 2:14 PM on September 27, 2011

Yes, but why do we need a 'service'? What's needed is a portable format plus an easy way to host it on the web on any server. Lots of people use dropbox now, which is just generic file hosting.

If all you want to do is backup your bookmarks and sync them across different machines, Chrome will do this transparently now. Just set up Google sync in the options panel. If you want to do more, like say easily share bookmarks, publish a stream of bookmarks, look at a stream of bookmarks coming in from a bunch of people, tags, etc, you kind of need a service.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 2:53 PM on September 27, 2011

>>I only use it for the bookmark manager that works with firefox.

Weirdly, all my tags and bundles exist when I use the Firefox delicious plug-in, but are not available from the site. The patient is on life support, and could go at any time.

It would be interesting to hear from someone who has yet to try the Firefox plug in, and is missing tags or bundles whether installing it brings their precious back to them.

Also, I notice on the bookmark export page they claim that all your tags will appear, even if they don't appear on the page.


>>and it doesn't show subcategories within a tag anymore
>>1 - Tags not listed alphabetically

Both working for me with Firefox plugin. For now.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 3:06 PM on September 27, 2011

If all you want to do is backup your bookmarks and sync them across different machines, Chrome will do this transparently now.

You're still using a service, in that case, it's just using Google. And chrome doesn't appear to support any kind of tagging.

If you want to do more, like say easily share bookmarks, publish a stream of bookmarks, look at a stream of bookmarks coming in from a bunch of people, tags, etc, you kind of need a service.

All of these things can be done without a centralized service. You need something running on a server somewhere, but why not give people the option to run it on their own server? They're pretty cheap these days, much cheaper then ISP service.
posted by delmoi at 3:09 PM on September 27, 2011

It's Digg v4 all over again. Makes me glad I never got into Delicious; watching a good service being inexplicably and irrevocably destroyed for no apparent reason is frustrating.
posted by Rhaomi at 5:08 PM on September 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm not impressed thus far, but I'm happy to have a working Firefox extension again (get the 'new' one -- it works up to FF7). I never did use any of the features other than bog-standard bookmarking, mostly, and that still seems to work fine for me (and all my old data seems to be there). I don't care about any of this 'stack' stuff, even if I understand why they think it's such a swell idea.

Hopefully they'll be responsive to the justified design criticisms that are being leveled, and work out some of the kinks.

We'll see, I guess.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:13 PM on September 27, 2011

So where do you guys *find* new stuff? Or is it too specific for that now, i.e tracking individual sites on google reader...
posted by mrgrimm at 5:17 PM on September 27, 2011

I used to love delicious. Until today, in fact.

I concur. I've already wrote a massive complaint email. I have over 15,000 links on the site and have been using del.icio.us to curate and back up my bookmarks since 2005. 1) I have a lot of eggs in that basket, link-wise. 2) I have it organized just so.. all my links are specially tagged with meticulous descriptions. 3) All my links were specially 'bundled'. I took del.icio.us way seriously. I wasn't interested in any social or networking aspect. I used it to back-up and organize similar sites that I might want to return to. If someone else found my links useful, great. If not, whatever. I was doing it for me.

I got the email to approve the new ToS, too, and I approved it immediately. I suppose I did think that I should export my links before the change over, but I bookmarked the page and then didn't get around to it. I didn't think my six years' worth of work would be decimated in one day.

When I first attempted to access del.icio.us yesterday, I should have known it was a bad sign. It took quite a few minutes for the site to even load. All of the 15,000+ bookmarks don't appear to have migrated over. All the bundling that I've done seems to have disappeared. On the right side of the screen there are a select few tags posted there. I don't know what the criteria is for what appears in that list. They are certainly not the most used tags in my system. Since I have so many links, I can't always recall off the top of my head every single tag I have ever employed, so I depend on the bundles that used to exist, as well as the handy tagging prompts that would pop up when I would type a few letters into the text field. The pop-ups don't happen anymore. Manually typing tags into the search box is not as easy as browsing (where I open up my neatly-collapsed bundle and see all the tags I've grouped together). Yeah, I know that, to some extent that's what the new stacks system is meant to do, but bundles did it better. It's just not as efficient. The entire site isn't as efficient. In my complaint email I asked what the purpose of the site is now. Because doesn't it seem as if the whole use or purpose is different?

Second, I haven't been able to successfully save a site on del.icio.us OR export my links since the change over yesterday. Which has me wondering what I'm supposed to do with the websites I want to archive online from now on and how I'm going to get everything I did on that site off of it.

I know it's a free site and they made no guarantees to me, and I know I should have been exporting it more frequently, but damn.. I didn't think the whole thing would disappear right away. It's a bad sign that a primitive MS-Paint picture of a skunk or a badger or whatever is the main selling point of the site now (the non-avatar avatar).

As I pointed out in my complaint email (which, YES, was as long as this rant, thankyouverymuch) regarding the irritating new tag-line about 'finding myself' through social network bookmarking: how can I find myself when I can't even find a bookmark I saved last week?! (I also complained about them trying to give ME a walk through of the ruins mechanics of a site that had once worked.. I said that, for once, I'M not the newbie.. the new owners are the newbie). They cocked up a system that has worked just fine for at least six years. It may not have been the sexiest site on earth, but oh del.icio.us, you were once a little workhorse. And there IS something about a site that is reliable, has had minimal downtime in YEARS, loads quickly from any system (regardless of browser or internet speed), and has never had a major fuck up in all that time. I can't think of any other site that I use heavily that could boast all of that.

It's making me wonder which will be the worse redesign: Facebook or del.icio.us. I just pray that Flickr doesn't get the wrong idea and start working towards whatever maddening goal all these other sites are speeding towards. Especially since, I pay for Flickr. So, I DO feel I have justified expectations that they don't mess with my stuff.

Sorry for the tl;dr. Thank you Dr. Metafilter for letting me vent. I think my session time is up.

(Incidentally, I FIND new stuff on Metafilter and I use del.icio.us to bookmark it. I have never used del.icio.us to find new stuff. I think del.icio.us is having an identity crisis. I, however, am not. I'm the same antisocial antitechnology Andy Rooney I've always been.)
posted by Mael Oui at 8:30 PM on September 27, 2011 [7 favorites]

Haha I have barely any time for metafilter in the first place...
posted by mitrieD at 9:15 PM on September 27, 2011

Diigo has the one-click thingy. It only works in Firefox, not in Chrome. But then, the old delicious one-click thingy didn't work in Chrome either.
posted by chavenet at 1:28 AM on September 28, 2011

I guess we should give them a while but they haven't explained what they plan to do. Which of the features that are now gone will they restore? Why won't they tell us? I'm not going to wait around for an indefinite period of time only to find out that something I consider essential will never return. Why didn't they send us an email describing their new philosophy, their goals and how the previous version will be integrated into the new one? This has been a very poorly handled transition.
posted by conrad53 at 8:45 AM on September 28, 2011

There may have been a bit of undue panic in this thread. From http://deliciousengineering.blogspot.com/ :

Missing Bookmarks: Some users have reported that they are missing bookmarks. Rest assured that your data has been preserved.

Tag Bundles: We have retained all tag bundle data, and are working to expose this for users.

Networks: We have all network data, and will are working on rolling this out with our user feeds in the near future.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 6:59 PM on September 28, 2011

Why does it seem like every valuable internet entity is hellbound on antagonizing their users these days? Delicious was ignored then dumped in garbage bag and dropped off by the side of the road by Yahoo, I don't trust Google any more and feel extremely insecure using any of their services... not even just for the privacy crimes, but because who knows how they will decide to link what services with whatever other services and cut you off if you don't do as they demand (as per G+ is currently apparently linked with Reader and Picassa, and not sure what else; if you delete your account, or they do, you lose those services, apparently?). Facebook was never a thing for me, but they are constantly intruding everywhere.

I can't even use Firefox anymore, since it's currently taking up all my CPU and hanging up every few minutes. My personal constellation of web services is now pretty much completely borked as compared to a year ago. Thank Gods Matt is a) not evil, b) not interested in selling MetaFilter, and c) a reassuringly conservative guy when it comes to "improvements."
posted by taz at 1:00 AM on September 29, 2011 [4 favorites]

Why didn't they send us an email describing their new philosophy, their goals and how the previous version will be integrated into the new one?

That's probably my biggest complaint. The only email I got explained that I had to authorize the content changeover. There was nothing that prepared users for the major change in functionality.

If you're not ready to launch, don't launch. If you're relaunching MP3.com as a shitty music news site, let users know beforehand.

I've already started up with Diigo. I'm thenwhat. Just testing it out. I'll do a bulk link dump later ...

There may have been a bit of undue panic in this thread.

Compared to the rest of the webs, I think we've been (fairly) composed.

AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

If you’re not seeing all your bookmarks right now, it’s because we made a late decision to limit the amount of data we initially transferred from Yahoo!. We’ll be restoring all the data into your profile in the coming weeks. We should have made this limitation clearer to everyone from the outset, and I want to apologize for any headaches it has caused or will cause.

Well that doesn't inspire confidence.

I can't even use Firefox anymore, since it's currently taking up all my CPU and hanging up every few minutes.

I had this problem a little with FF 3.5 and then also with 4, but it *seems* like it's gotten better lately. I switched to Chrome after the mess of FF 3.5 (personas?), and am running Chrome 15, which is *OK* but obviously not as extensible as FF. I occasionally use Firefox for certain Web tools and, again, it *seems* a little better now in terms of memory management.

There is also the plugin container fix for FF, though I'm not sure it applies to later versions. Aside from that fix, and updating to the latest FF, I'd recommend Chrome.
posted by mrgrimm at 8:34 AM on September 29, 2011

Yeah, this launch has gone really poorly. I've got to wonder if they had a negotiated deadline from Yahoo to be out of their datacenter and had no choice but to launch with what they had. If so, poor planning, I feel bad for them.
posted by Nelson at 9:10 AM on September 29, 2011

Is there a simple way to export only private links from delicious? I set up Pinboard a while ago and set it to import everything from delicous, but of course it only imports public links, so I need a way to get my private links into Pinboard.

I see that Pinboard has grown a bit, so I hope the tag suggestions will be more useful now. That, and the lack of a firefox extension, were keeping me from using it until now.
posted by davar at 10:02 AM on September 29, 2011

My private bookmarks (which is most of them) still aren't showing up in the delicious browser plugin.
posted by delmoi at 2:07 PM on September 29, 2011

(Oh, and I actually tried marking some bookmarks as 'private' in the browser, but when I restarted firefox they were gone)
posted by delmoi at 2:09 PM on September 29, 2011

Oh hey! Actually I followed the instructions here and it seems to have fixed things. Except I actually skipped step 2, which would have required me to re login to every site I'm currently logged on to.
posted by delmoi at 2:30 PM on September 29, 2011

I can think of very few website redesigns and renovations I've been happy with (e.g. Rotten Tomatoes). The new Slate redesign reminds me of the Delicious reboot. Several days ago I could look at my Delicious page and see a dozen links, now I can see three and I have to scroll down and load another page to see a dozen links. Several days ago I could look at Slate and see everything new that was posted today and yesterday. If I wanted to eyeball a weeks worth of postings I had to scroll a little bit. Now I have to scroll down an entire page of distracting pictures just to see what's been posted in the last few days. It looks more like a trashy tabloid now.
posted by dgaicun at 1:13 AM on September 30, 2011

zdnet comment with info about accessing the old delicious
posted by yonderboy at 4:10 AM on September 30, 2011 [1 favorite]