y.ah.oo

December 9, 2005 11:55 AM

y.ah.oo Del.icio.us bought by Yahoo. Another one bites the dust? I miss the days when del.icio.us was largely undocumented and was a somewhat underground, community-based project. What will the corporate buyout mean for everyone's favourite link sharing site?
posted by sid (69 comments total)

o shi
posted by monju_bosatsu at 11:56 AM on December 9, 2005

It probably means that it'll be better.
posted by panoptican at 11:57 AM on December 9, 2005

it means BANNER ADS EVERYWHERE
posted by keswick at 11:59 AM on December 9, 2005

everyone's favourite link sharing site

pft. lemmings.
posted by quonsar at 12:00 PM on December 9, 2005

Del.icio.us worked fine when it looked like it was put together by a UNIX sysadmin on a week-long Bawls binge. Don't get me wrong, I think it's awesome that the project is seeing so much success. I'm just nostalgic for the good old days.
posted by sid at 12:00 PM on December 9, 2005

It's not my favorite link sharing website. I think it's amazingly ugly to look at, to be honest. And I like places like Metafilter, where I tend to get an explanation of why a link is good/interesting before I click on it.

Mostly though, it means you get to tell stories about how you were totally into del.icio.us back when it was cool, before they totally sold out, man.

And yes, it means banner ads everywhere. That's the most common side effect of a Yahoo take over.
posted by davros42 at 12:02 PM on December 9, 2005

I wonder how much it cost yahoo?
posted by cell divide at 12:18 PM on December 9, 2005

It means money for some dude. Good for him. How long untill MSN buys metafilter?
posted by delmoi at 12:18 PM on December 9, 2005

davros42: I think it's amazingly ugly to look at... Who actually visits delicious? The only time I'm there is to bookmark something. Otherwise I use their rss feeds and firefox's nifty live bookmarks. I'll be unhappy if yahoo starts sticking ads in the feed for my 'daily' tag.
posted by simra at 12:22 PM on December 9, 2005

Hopefully it will mean the end of that idiotic "cloud" tag display meme.
posted by lodurr at 12:28 PM on December 9, 2005

How long untill MSN buys metafilter?

Metafilter is ColdFusion, delmoi. MSN can't even sense its existence. It would be like the Accountants Union mounting a hostile takeover of the Unitarian Church.
posted by lodurr at 12:31 PM on December 9, 2005

Interesting, Yahoo already had a del.icio.us type service called My Web 2.0, which had some improvements over del.icio.us such as being able to save a cached copy of a link (I wish firefox did that automatically with bookmarks) and being able to "not share" some links if you want, and you can have tags with spaces in them (you enter tags with commas seperating them, which is much better than the unix thowback of NotUsingSpaces or Using_Underscores). Here's an example of the tag podcast.

The only reason I've prefered del.icio.us is that I can use a javascript bookmarklet to add bookmarks, with Yahoo I had to install their toolbar if I want to do that simply... (though I just found out today they've added a bookmarklet tool).
posted by bobo123 at 12:31 PM on December 9, 2005

It's the Microsoft business model: Yahoo isn't innovating, they're marketing.

The web is diverse enough right now that it won't have much of an effect, but if content becomes concentrated into the hands of a small cabel of corporations, the web is going to become stale, boring, and bloated with advertising.

(I give it a week before Yahoo starts fudging the links to quietly direct more hits to their clients.)
posted by Jatayu das at 12:32 PM on December 9, 2005

Your favorite website sucks.
posted by sciurus at 12:36 PM on December 9, 2005

It does seem strange since I too saw My Web (how is that doing?) as a competitor to delicious. Perhaps they were mostly bought so that someone else wouldnt buy them?

These days, though, I've been using the StumbleUpon toolbar which nicely overlays with both my yahoo and google searches (until they too get bought I guess)
posted by vacapinta at 12:41 PM on December 9, 2005

land.of.cheese. Well it is Yahoo related.
posted by romanb at 12:47 PM on December 9, 2005

I, for one, welcome our new Yahoo! overlords.

Come on, admit it: You too would love to be bought out by somebody for cold hard cash.
posted by GeorgeHernandez at 12:47 PM on December 9, 2005

Notwithstanding the booster drivel, it both amuses and saddens me that "Web 2.0" is indeed turning out to be just another exit strategy and hype spew for tool makers, as many people said all along.

Yahoo is where good ideas go to die in its evil, uncaring corporate bosom of anti-user hostility. EGroups. Geocities. Broadcast. The list goes on and on.

"When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements - the invention of some new valve or sprocket - while remaining heedless of the world's barbarism"
(Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot)

The young and the naive at least have an excuse for credulous optimism. Those old enough to know better usually *do* know better, but have a vested interest in the whole bubble boosterism.
posted by meehawl at 12:49 PM on December 9, 2005

I'm glad to see that Josh Schachter is going to get rewarded for all the work he's put in.

As for My Web 2.0, here's their url for the podcast tag:
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6&tag=podcast

Here's the del.icio.us url:
http://del.icio.us/tag/podcast

Del.icio.us wins again. I don't get why the competition sibling has such a hard time wrapping their brains around something as simple as a clean url.
posted by mullingitover at 12:51 PM on December 9, 2005

The web is diverse enough right now that it won't have much of an effect, but if content becomes concentrated into the hands of a small cabel of corporations, the web is going to become stale, boring, and bloated with advertising.

it doesn't really matter much. the physical infrastructure of the internet is already owned by a small cabal of corporations, it's only a matter of time before, little by little, control is excercised over non-cabal produced content, until the web is shaped into the new television: stale, boring, and bloated with advertising. don't tell me you're still buying into that hippy-dippy 'information wants to be free' crap!
posted by quonsar at 12:52 PM on December 9, 2005

th.is s.uck.s

Yahoo! Banner! Ads! Here! We! Come!
posted by hardcoreUFO at 12:53 PM on December 9, 2005

I was just thinking yesterday that Google should buy del.icio.us.i Google seems to be more benign then Yahoo as far as ruining things they buy. It's a natural fit for a search engine company to buy what is essentially a web directory where people do all the work of categorizing things for free. I use delicious as a handy way to have bookmarks accessible from many different computers, and I also think it makes a good collaborative tool for bookmarking sites that are relevant to projects that I work on with other people.
posted by jefeweiss at 12:56 PM on December 9, 2005

Flickr hasn't been ruined. Upcoming hasn't been ruined. Why will del.icio.us be ruined?
posted by danb at 12:56 PM on December 9, 2005

It'll be ruined once they force Yahoo! logins on everyone. Everything that requires a yahoo! login turns to shit. Heck, I have enough trouble with Yahoo! Groups and their own damn logins.
posted by drstein at 1:00 PM on December 9, 2005

3...countdown...2...to...1...punch the monkey...

Disclaimer: My coworkers and I are developing a Web 2.0 site, and if we were bought out by Yahoo/Google/Microsoft we'd be wetter than Houston 620.
posted by Kickstart70 at 1:01 PM on December 9, 2005

I've been using the poorly named Memeflow for a while now, and was waiting for a few more features before making a FPP about it. It isn't del.icio.us (which is also poorly named IMHO) in that it doesn't have tags and doesn't feature any real real link sharing besides the ten most popular and 10 most common links. But it still manages to have a much more useful and usable interface, several other minor features such as RSS feeds and OPML exports of bookmarks, and development on it is regular and the application stable. This has made it good enough that I've made it the home page on several of my machines.

Oh, that and I managed to make show Metafilter the number one site users visit most.
posted by furtive at 1:03 PM on December 9, 2005

This is either a good thing or a bad thing or a think I do not care about or a thing that upsets me or a thing I ought to write my congressman about or a thing to just skip ovre as a Who Cares? item Or something. I wait for strong advice from the comments here to decide.
posted by Postroad at 1:06 PM on December 9, 2005

Re: lodurr: It would be like the Accountants Union mounting a hostile takeover of the Unitarian Church.

Sounds like somebody played a lot of Steve Jackson's Illuminati back in the day! Loved that game.
posted by zpousman at 1:07 PM on December 9, 2005

Who cares about banner ads? Don't you people use AdBlock or equivalent?
posted by about_time at 1:13 PM on December 9, 2005

On a personal level, this means I write my own del.licio.us-esque app which stores my tagged links locally but interfaces with the community at large. That is, if Yahoo!'s implementation can be hacked with a simple %s string replacement interface.

More broadly, yay for someone hitting the jackpot with the buyout. Good design should be rewarded more often.
posted by Fezboy! at 1:23 PM on December 9, 2005

danb: Flickr hasn't been ruined. Upcoming hasn't been ruined. Why will del.icio.us be ruined?

I haven't yet decided how I feel about this takeover, but one reason I could posit that del.icio.us is more likely to be ruined is because the value of the app is its simplicity and lack of UI. Flickr and Upcoming already had their own unique UIs. del.icio.us is is about the app, not about its appearance. If I want to make del.icio.us pretty, I can use XSLT or greasemonkey or whatever. If Yahoo picks a new interface for me, my participation is over. I'm not saying they will, I'm just saying that they might regard del.icio.us as less mature than flickr and proceed accordingly, and I'm perfectly happy with the service the way it is.
posted by cacophony at 1:25 PM on December 9, 2005

From the MemeFlow page: "Using GoTo couldn't be simper."
posted by merelyglib at 1:29 PM on December 9, 2005

Did they buy them with real money or did they use that fake Internet Monopoly money that people were throwing around years ago?

I seem to recall Geocities being worth more than Saab at the time.
posted by unixrat at 1:32 PM on December 9, 2005

Metafilter: Your favorite website sucks.
posted by bluno at 1:40 PM on December 9, 2005

lol bluno.

There's a PHP/SQL app called Scuttle that is an open source del.icio.us clone. I'm trying to get it setup for my jobs intranet. When it works it's awesome.

Some issues with compatiblity between various flavors of IIS/PHP/mySQL, nothing wrong with the software itself.

All in all great for the del.icio.us team for getting bought out. Lets see how long the API stays open...

3...2...
posted by daHIFI at 1:58 PM on December 9, 2005

stop walmarting my web 2.0!!!!!!!
posted by VulcanMike at 1:58 PM on December 9, 2005

I like places like Metafilter, where I tend to get an explanation of why a link is good/interesting before I click on it.

Two different sites. del.icio.us is a tool, not really a site.
posted by yerfatma at 1:58 PM on December 9, 2005

you know what's really cool?

this post has no tags.
posted by gsb at 2:03 PM on December 9, 2005

sorry! haven't posted in a while, forgot about this new-fangled tag thing.
posted by sid at 2:14 PM on December 9, 2005

Has anyone posted in the Metafilter Blue, Grey or Green yet that Yahoo just launched Yahoo Answers, a virtual rip of AskMefi?
posted by jeremias at 2:21 PM on December 9, 2005

Does this mean that del.icio.us users in China will no longer be able to use tags like "democracy" and "freedom"? Or will yahoo just report them to the Chinese goverment if they do?
posted by thedward at 2:24 PM on December 9, 2005

Congratulations, Joshua!
posted by Nelson at 2:30 PM on December 9, 2005

Has anyone posted in the Metafilter Blue, Grey or Green yet that Yahoo just launched Yahoo Answers, a virtual rip of AskMefi?

Yes.
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:33 PM on December 9, 2005

meehawl scribbled "Yahoo is where good ideas go to die in its evil, uncaring corporate bosom of anti-user hostility. EGroups. Geocities. Broadcast. The list goes on and on. "

Amen! Here's hoping they don't screw this up.

danb scribbled "Flickr hasn't been ruined. Upcoming hasn't been ruined. Why will del.icio.us be ruined?"

They haven't had flickr long, wait till a round of marketing types think they can squeeze more ad revenue out of it.

about_time scribbled "Who cares about banner ads? Don't you people use AdBlock or equivalent?"

Tough to effectively ad block an interstatial. Imagine every page load on del.icio.us requiring bypassing an ad. Groups is sometimes as bad as every second message. Plus they limit archives and and make it tough to extract the messages to create your own archive.
posted by Mitheral at 2:45 PM on December 9, 2005

So far I like blinklist. The tools for adding pages don't play well with Safari yet, but it's a nice UI. Just don't leave the "b" off the URI.
posted by terrapin at 2:49 PM on December 9, 2005

Tough to effectively ad block an interstatial.

What? No, easy as pie. Here's a GreaseMonkey script to skip Yahoo Groups interstitials.
posted by mendel at 3:02 PM on December 9, 2005

Who cares about banner ads? Don't you people use AdBlock or equivalent?

Since I've got a friend who lives by the ads on his website, I've come to see how important they are, so I don't block them. I don't fault anyone for wanting to block them (especially annoying ones like sound, popups, etc.), but it's not what I want to do.
posted by Kickstart70 at 3:10 PM on December 9, 2005

With the ad block scripts, those ads still load but aren't seen on the browser, still giving your friend credit for a page impression. His click through rate just suffers because of it.
posted by Mijo Bijo at 3:41 PM on December 9, 2005

I hate myweb. I was using it but was trying to delete all the stupid "imported delicious" tags that they added when I imported my old links. So I go to the bulk edit, delete tags. It should just delete the tags, right? No it ends up deleting the whole fucking link. Good thing I still had all those on delicious. I wrote an angry email, but like always, I never ever hear back from them. I moved all my links back to delicious that night. Now this. fuckign shit. I hope they don't change much.
posted by corpse at 3:51 PM on December 9, 2005

Upcoming didn't start sucking as soon as it was purchased, and neither did Flickr. There are no additional ads on either service. And frankly speaking, I think any changes to the minimal delicious UI will be an improvement.

I kind of like My Web 2.0 better in some ways (private, friends only, and everyone posting, plus cached copies and unlimited description fields), but I like the delicious api and blog posting feature. Yahoo is known for having open APIs, so I don't suspect they'll change much.

I'm kind of on the fence whether this is a good thing though. I thought Joshua had turned down zillions of buyout offers and was going to continue doing it on his own.
posted by mathowie at 3:56 PM on December 9, 2005

"His click through rate just suffers because of it."

Yep, and ads are more and more pay-per-click instead of pay-per-impression. Luckily my friend has a mix of both.

But anyway, I do not dispute anyone's right to block ads, just that some people like me are willing to have them there because they often make great content possible.
posted by Kickstart70 at 4:06 PM on December 9, 2005

I feel like people are selling their Web 2.0 companies too soon. A del.ico.us with 10m members would be a powerful independent force on the web.

But then again, everyone's got their own financial constraints, as well as it being tough to bring a free web service to a much higher userbase without being ready to lose a lot of money.

I don't think Yahoo! will 'wreck' it, but I'm curio.us to see if there's any way for del.ico.us to keep its indepdent vibe, or if Yahoo! will start the adfest too soon, before it can really take off in terms of users.
posted by cell divide at 4:37 PM on December 9, 2005

Yahoo have a long way to go amongst the technorati before they redeem themselves for their excesses of the .com boom.

However, they do seem to have come a long way, and really do seem to 'get' the whole 'web 2.0' thing - more than Google seem to, anyway.

I especially look forward to the possiblities that will emerge from integration between Flickr and del.icio.us.
posted by davem at 5:18 PM on December 9, 2005

What will the corporate buyout mean for everyone's favourite link sharing site?

It's simple. I'll probably leave.
posted by sjvilla79 at 7:13 PM on December 9, 2005

Davem: just buying a bunch of intresting, popular companies dosn't mean they 'get' it more then google. Or maybe it does, but that dosn't mean "web 2.0" is really all that desireable. Google is is great at inovating on there own. If google had come up with their own 'google bookmarks' system it probably would have gotten as big as del.icio.us in a few weeks. And they still can do this if they ever think it's a good idea.
posted by delmoi at 7:14 PM on December 9, 2005

Yahoo! Answers, a virtual rip of AskMeFi: Yes, METAFILTER IS DOOMED. Have you seen the Microsoft ripoff? The glory days of Web 0.8 beta are over. Time to jump ship, posthaste.

random.com in exchange for cold, hard cash: Yes, that is exactly how it works. Yahoo! hands you a suitcase full of unmarked bills, just like in the movies, and you go on your merry way. Guess I'd better brush up on my RSS/PHP/whatever. ....

I feel like people are selling their Web 2.0 companies too soon.: Excuse me, I have boo.com on the line. They have an important message for you.

...and in direct response to Matt: giid point, you don't know what buyout terms they got, man. Given the amount of hype del. has received, they were in a position to pretty much pick and choose their buyers (I'm sure you know noooothing about hat situation), and aside from the big G, it doesn't get much better than Yahoo!. Personally, I'd say kudos to Josh.

Yahoo! seems to understand that you should let a good thing be (see: Flickr), and I hope del. gets the opportunity to take the site in a direction that continues to help the 'net community at large. If not, I'm sure they'll have to fight for the top of their little hill sooner rather than later. Good luck to 'em.
posted by spiderwire at 10:40 PM on December 9, 2005

Oh, and: for what it's worth (is 'FWIW' the hip acronym nowadays?), I don't use del.icio.us. I've pored through it at least a dozen times, and their interface is goddamn atrocious. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't friggin' get it. I stare at for a good long while and think "fuck it, I'm going to reddit/mefi/fark/whatever."

Never understood what all the accolades were about anyway.

So: Good for Yahoo! buying it. Light a little profit motive under their asses. Maybe I'll start to use the damn thing.

[NB: this is a little bit more libertartian than my usual. amberglow, please forget this. Thank you. *cough*]
posted by spiderwire at 10:45 PM on December 9, 2005

**good. **that.





....time to go to bed.
posted by spiderwire at 10:47 PM on December 9, 2005

I hope Yahoo doesn't change what works. Del.icio.us looks like shit, is difficult to get around at first, and needs a little work to get working as you want it. But its open nature, and the very fact that it is minimal, makes it the best link sharing tool in existence. I can use it to do what I want to do, rather than trying to bend a developer's idea of a useful function to my will.
posted by lemur at 11:04 PM on December 9, 2005

lemur: rather than trying to bend a developer's idea of a useful function to my will.

i'd dispute that.

del. has always struck me as the sort of site that i -- as a developer -- would implement if i intended to bring functional link sharing to the non-slashdot masses. but following my UI advice is... well... suicidal, and that's putting it lightly.

i, personally, as a lazy websurfing bastard, have always found the site confusing (read: i can't find neat stuff one link from the home page) and have remanded myself to the sites mentioned above. (metafilter, reddit, fark, slashdot, digg, etc etc)

quite a waste, if you ask me.

that said, you're right. if Yahoo! decides to bring the corporate usability behemoth to bear upon delicious, they'll get what they deserve, considering its current state -- a bit pile of crufty crap. i mean, let's face it -- despite the hype, that site's got a long ways to go before it lives up to its potential.

but, that said, it's the best of what's out there, hands down. take that for what you will, your milage may vary, blah blah.
posted by spiderwire at 12:32 AM on December 10, 2005

davem: However, they do seem to have come a long way, and really do seem to 'get' the whole 'web 2.0' thing - more than Google seem to, anyway.

I don't 'get' the whole 'web 2.0' thing. Can someone explain it to me? I thought there were a few cool sites popping up and some overhyped blathering about tags and Ajax saving the internets when suddenly we're on version 2.
posted by melt away at 3:08 AM on December 10, 2005

"The whole web 2.0 thing" is different, depending on whatever you think it is. If you think of "web 2.0" as AJAX, I would argue that Yahoo "gets it" at a pretty profound level; if you think of "web 2.0" as commercial integration of hte parts, Yahoo gets that, too. If you think of "web 2.0" as scamming for revenue based on how "cool" they are, then no, Yahoo doesn't get that.

One thing that I think geeks usually lack an appreciation for is what for lack of a better term I'll call "intertias of scale": The ways in which large applications and institutions are constrained by their size. I say "appreciateion" because geeks understand the sluggishness that comes from size, but they don't appreciate the complexities of size.

Yahoo is vast by comparison with Google. They deliver intentional content (as opposed to Google's serendipitous content) across a really wide range of offerings. It takes time to execute change across that broad spectrum.

My gut tells me that there won't be many fundamental changes in del.icio.us. I think that what they want from them is something different from what they get with their own bookmarking offerings. Technology, on the one hand, yes; but more, I think they want the interfaces and the social networkign inroads into the Googleite camp.

As for the "corporate UI machine", Yahoo will get what it pays for. You may not like thir approach ot UI, but it makes them a lot of money. They're not going to change things to suit some net.geek's idea of what's cool; that's not what makes them money.
posted by lodurr at 6:47 AM on December 10, 2005

Who actually visits delicious?

I do. A lot. I live for games.

Also, you get to see 75% of the links before they show up here.

Has anyone posted in the Metafilter Blue, Grey or Green yet that Yahoo just launched Yahoo Answers, a virtual rip of AskMefi?

I though Google Answers was long before AskMefi.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:55 AM on December 10, 2005

Also, what happens to the pornography?
posted by mrgrimm at 9:57 AM on December 10, 2005

sid: I was hoping you were being deliberately obtuse.

addendum: Why wait... use the power of Greasemonkey to turn every web page into a Yahoo! company.
posted by gsb at 9:59 AM on December 10, 2005

del.icio.us was valuable partially to me because of the type of users and links it attracted, so I knew it was a place I could go to find the obscure things that hadn't been posted to boing-boing or wherever yet. I think has it gains more users (doubtless it will as it becomes a yahoo!) that the amount of time to find relevant items may increase. maybe they'll add a feature that will allow you to choose a del.ico.us subgroup of links to view (but creating that group would require knowing the people involved).
secondly, the small learning curve required to use del.ico.us actually helped. I still don't know how to use tags well, but I understand the concept a little more.
it introduced me to much more technical articles than I would have ever read as an editor by trade. so, I guess in many ways I have to thank it for that.
lastly, it was a corner of the web for those of us that think better on text-based pages. graphics tire me.
I don't want every page I'm reading to look like the cover of the book, just the cover. (ok, very long for my first post, I'll stop here.(
posted by ejaned8 at 4:45 PM on December 10, 2005

The media reports del.ic.ious was a nine person company. Nine? Really? What did they do?
posted by ewagoner at 6:03 PM on December 10, 2005

gsb: I wish I was that clever.
posted by sid at 6:09 PM on December 10, 2005

melt away: 'Web 2.0' is an overused buzzword lately, but for what it's worth here's a description, and an attempt at visualising the parts of it that make up the whole.

To me, it's more a concept than a group of technolgies.
posted by davem at 2:11 AM on December 14, 2005