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December 16, 2010 12:52 PM   Subscribe

Yahoo to shut down Del.icio.us, other sites. After a series of layoffs, Yahoo announced internally that a number of Yahoo products would be shut down, and others merged into existing features of the Yahoo main site.
posted by zabuni (260 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite
 
Hmm... Where is Groups?
posted by Artw at 12:52 PM on December 16, 2010


Argh. I use Delicious so much. That's going to be so annoying. I would pay for Delicious.
posted by DanCall at 12:55 PM on December 16, 2010 [16 favorites]


Delicious was the one good thing they have going. How unfortunate.
posted by special-k at 12:56 PM on December 16, 2010 [41 favorites]


*had
posted by special-k at 12:56 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Looks like I'll need to find another way to quickly capture the links I want to publish on my blog but am too lazy to create a post about/aren't substantial enough to create a new post for.

Any suggestion for a tool that will easily do this and publish the links (with my comments) once a day?


(This isn't really that important a need, as my blog has, like so many others, not exactly started gathering weeds, but is certainly cob-webby.)

posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:56 PM on December 16, 2010


How is yahoo formed?
posted by Ad hominem at 12:56 PM on December 16, 2010 [12 favorites]


Bad move. Delicious is an excellent search engine. Sell it to someone at least.
posted by ejoey at 12:56 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


The fact that the CEO didn't even mention Flickr in the layoff announcement is mind-boggling.
posted by middleclasstool at 12:57 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Yet Yahoo! Answers survives? Oh, the humanity!
posted by sbutler at 12:57 PM on December 16, 2010 [37 favorites]


Never heard of it.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:57 PM on December 16, 2010


Anyone have suggestions for a replacement service?
posted by jenkinsEar at 12:59 PM on December 16, 2010


Delicious is still a fantastic service that I use regularly. I think this is a blow to the idea that you should store your data in the cloud. If a company with the resources of Yahoo can't keep the lights on, who can?
posted by pb at 1:00 PM on December 16, 2010 [94 favorites]


Yahoo! Answers is the only relevant Yahoo! property. They should refocus on generating more hillarious questions.
posted by Ad hominem at 1:01 PM on December 16, 2010 [7 favorites]



posted by starman at 1:02 PM on December 16, 2010 [51 favorites]


Lastpass just acquired Xmarks. Maybe they'll do something social with it along the same lines as Delicious, now that there's a vacuum.
posted by fleetmouse at 1:02 PM on December 16, 2010


Of all the free things I must have on the internet to make my life easier or better or more social or more convenient or truly portable, delicious (and twitter) is the only one that did for me exactly what it promised it would do and which I still use pretty actively. Grargh.
posted by crush-onastick at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2010 [6 favorites]


jenkinsEar - there's a lot out there. diigo.com perhaps - or something like pinboard.in might be what yr looking for..

and there's always wikipedia's list
posted by zenwerewolf at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


And of course they just had to lay off these people just before Christmas.
And yes I know the reason why - year-end fiscal reports and someone's bonus depended on reducing spending. Still pisses me off.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2010 [20 favorites]


A much bigger piece of history is also on the chopping block: AltaVista.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Hey, AltaVista is on that 'sunset' slide too.

Strange that that resonates with me much more than Del.icio.us.
posted by mazola at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


I'm not sure this is the deathknell for cloud storage in general given how monumentally incompetent Yahoo can be. I think the real messages are "choose your cloud provider carefully" and "don't assume your need for backup and redundancy go away just because you store your data in the cloud."
posted by tommasz at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2010 [7 favorites]


Anyone know of a stand-alone tool I could host on my own Apache server that would do the same basic things Delicious does? I have 10,585 bookmarks on there...which, exported, is only like 2 MB.
posted by limeonaire at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [9 favorites]


How will I keep track of all my favorite fanfiction now?? #totallyserious
posted by exceptinsects at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Pinboard is a great Delicious replacement. Check out their tour as well as a page detailing the differences between Pinboard and Delicious.
posted by chrispederick at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [7 favorites]


a blow to the idea that you should store your data in the cloud

Well, only if they don't give users a way to get their data out first. I know very little about Delicious, so I don't know if they do that.

Also, that only applies if you _only_ store your data in the cloud. I have a bunch of data where the primary copy is now in the cloud but I have local backups. However, I realize that's something 98% of people won't bother to do.
posted by wildcrdj at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010


Everone's known Yahoo! is a sinking continent since at least 2007. Their acquisition of the Isle of Flickr is why I won't renew my account.
posted by clarknova at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


They're only shutting down AllTheWeb now?
posted by ardgedee at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Yahoo! hasn't been relevant since around 1999. It's a pity it's taking down some good acquisitions in its deaththrows.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


I'm surprised at how sad I am about this. Delicious is (...was *sniff*) one of my favourite web services.
posted by Zozo at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [5 favorites]


And of course they just had to lay off these people just before Christmas.

I dunno...someone close to me just got laid off and that was my first thought too, but by getting the news before Christmas it does give you some time to avoid the incursion of holiday debt.
posted by massysett at 1:06 PM on December 16, 2010


The loss of del.icio.us is certainly a shame. But to me, the even bigger question is, what they'll do with Flickr. While still wildly popular, similarly to delicious it has long lost its original founders to new and interesting projects (Stewart Butterfield is building Glitch at Tiny Speck, and Caterina Fake continues to build out Hunch), and afaik is still unprofitable. There are also rumors that a number of Yahoos from the product group within Flickr have been let go. Assuming Yahoo wouldn't just shut down Flickr, who could/should acquire it?
posted by CaffeineFree at 1:07 PM on December 16, 2010


limeonaire: my pal Dan Chudnov built unalog which I think will do what you want. You'd have to contact him directly but I'm pretty sure it's open source and extensible for your purposes.
posted by jessamyn at 1:08 PM on December 16, 2010 [6 favorites]


There's an AskMe on the question of where to migrate from Delicious.
posted by Prince_of_Cups at 1:08 PM on December 16, 2010 [10 favorites]


If a company with the resources of Yahoo can't keep the lights on, who can?

Is that fair though? Yahoo has seemed like a bus stop for a set of unrelated apps they don't care about for years. Where Google is if anything too interested in linking all of my Google stuff together, there's no suggestion that my Flickr account knows anything about my del.icio.us account, even after the shit-storm they stirred up forcing Flickr users to move to Yahoo's login system a few years back.

It's like they collected disparate services in an attempt to show a great swath of people how little they gave a shit about them. As for keeping the lights on, Yahoo's felt like an abandoned basement for years.
posted by yerfatma at 1:09 PM on December 16, 2010 [16 favorites]


Delicious was the one good thing they have going.

I would add Flickr. Without these 2 services, I wouldn't even know Yahoo still existed.
posted by coolguymichael at 1:09 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


"choose your cloud provider carefully"

Some of us made our choice before it was sold to Yahoo.

Now to figure out how to export my bookmarks from Delicious...
posted by asciident at 1:09 PM on December 16, 2010 [11 favorites]


Thanks for forcing me over to Google Bookmarks, assholes.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:10 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Now to figure out how to export my bookmarks from Delicious...

https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export
posted by Joe Beese at 1:11 PM on December 16, 2010 [13 favorites]


People with Macs may want to use the deadlicious app to figure out which of their bookmarks are still good before doing mass exports.
posted by jessamyn at 1:13 PM on December 16, 2010 [19 favorites]


(Stewart Butterfield is building Glitch at Tiny Speck, and Caterina Fake continues to build out Hunch)

Caterina left Hunch. Not only Stewart but most the major Flickr founders (Stewart, Cal, Eric) are building an awesome game. It is still in beta but go check it out.
posted by vacapinta at 1:14 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


My twitter feed is full of early adopters moaning and pissing because pinboard is having a rough time with all the people joining today. I thought about it a while back and didn't, and the price has gone up significantly. (The price to join is based on the installed base and is still about $7 but the last time I checked it was $5 and change.)

I just hope there's something in place for when Yahoo screws up Flickr. I really love Flickr but Yahoo's time is clearly coming to an end. It's the one I'm most concerned about backing up and getting the metadata out of. I have most of the photos in iPhoto but I don't have the tags and such in iPhoto yet.
posted by immlass at 1:15 PM on December 16, 2010 [7 favorites]


Where Google is if anything too interested in linking all of my Google stuff together, there's no suggestion that my Flickr account knows anything about my del.icio.us account, even after the shit-storm they stirred up forcing Flickr users to move to Yahoo's login system a few years back.

While I agree with you in general, Google/Youtube account linking is a giant clusterfuck. "I have to log out to add a Youtube account? What the fuck? Why can't I just straight up use my Google login?"
posted by kmz at 1:15 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


I've had no use for them since they fucked up Musicmatch all those years ago.
posted by OHenryPacey at 1:17 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Delicious' most recent updates were just piss and were a major step backward. They also managed to take a dump on my autoposted wordpress blog a few weeks back.

That said, I use(d) it pretty heavily and found lots of great stuff through my 'network'. I guess I'll look into pinboard, but if the network I put together doesn't move with me I lose half the benefit of the site.

Decisions like this really make me question where I should be storing my photos online. Flickr might have been once great, but these people are total boneheads. Delicious was originally run by one or two people, but a giant company doesn't have the resources for it?
posted by mike_bling at 1:20 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


Seeing so much red it's hard to make out what I'm typing but DIAF YAHOO.

Long live delicious.
posted by mullingitover at 1:21 PM on December 16, 2010 [5 favorites]


Delicious is still a fantastic service that I use regularly. I think this is a blow to the idea that you should store your data in the cloud.

Yeah, absolute death of that whole cloud idea. If the life span of these things is five years, that's just enough to cause serious damage, and perhaps just below the gestation time for any significant project that might have been being built using it. These services should be indemnified with endowments that guarantee not to destroy peoples trusting efforts.

Won't be fooled again.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:21 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


Dammit. I'm really going to miss Delicious. :(
posted by zarq at 1:21 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Yahoo actually does sports/fantasy sports pretty well. Their projections are horrible though.
posted by drezdn at 1:23 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Delicious' most recent updates were just piss and were a major step backward.

---

... this was a ground up redesign that was discussed in great length with our design team, product management and engineering.

And two weeks after the roll-out, they find out the service is being shut down.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:23 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Delicious is the Simpsons of bookmarking sites. I will remember it fondly for its good years. (And Pinboard is like Louie?)
posted by domnit at 1:23 PM on December 16, 2010 [5 favorites]


I like Delicious, even though I rarely ever go back and look at the things I tagged on it. Mostly I used it to capture links and then dump them to a single weekly blog post on Saturdays.

A few weeks ago I considered switching this to Tumblr, but didn't know if it was possible to a similar weekly Tumblr recap automatically. (I am also concerned about a similar thing happening with Tumblr, since then seem unwilling or unable to even implement a working queue function.)

Other than pinboard, any other suggestions for something like this?
posted by Legomancer at 1:24 PM on December 16, 2010


Not exactly the same as delicious, but pinterest is an interesting bookmarking/scrapbooking thing
posted by johnny novak at 1:24 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Heard about this a couple days ago from a guy I've known for decades who was with del.icio.us since it was a little bitty thing. This is horrible for them, and all the others, who have put so much into it, just because the stupid suits at the top of the food chain just don't know how to run a business.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:24 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Yahoo actually does sports/fantasy sports pretty well.

Crap, I knew there was something I still used on Yahoo. Their sports coverage is actually pretty decent, and their front page, while still full of crap, is less crapful than ESPN or Sporting News.
posted by kmz at 1:27 PM on December 16, 2010


I like pinboard, but I missed delicious Firefox extension too much so I switched back. I found the extension much faster than the pinboard bookmarklet, and I didn't like the autocompletion of pinboard. Is there a bookmarking system with a great bookmarking interface? I don't need anything online, I could use something self-installed, but I really like delicious tag suggestions from other people who bookmarked the same url.
posted by davar at 1:27 PM on December 16, 2010 [7 favorites]


I wish Yahoo would just sell off Flickr and Delicious if they can't manage running them. It's going to be painful if they decide to sunset Flickr in the future.
posted by asciident at 1:27 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


And wow, could I have used the word "crap" a few more times in that comment?
posted by kmz at 1:28 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


This news broke mere moments after I paid up for 2 more years of Flickr. Now I'm scared.
posted by nowonmai at 1:30 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


First Bloglines, now Delicious. The future of five years ago is now in the dustbin of history.
posted by Rarebit Fiend at 1:30 PM on December 16, 2010 [20 favorites]


That really sucks. I have used del.icio.us heavily for years...
posted by rollbiz at 1:31 PM on December 16, 2010


One of my favorite pastimes on the internet for many years has been surfing the awesome tag.

.
posted by mullingitover at 1:35 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Son of a bitch.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:36 PM on December 16, 2010 [6 favorites]


Also, layoffs the week before Christmas. Stay classy, yahoo.
posted by mullingitover at 1:37 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


pinboard.in is like delicious but better, anyway. you can move everything right over. it's like delicious never happened.
posted by Avenger50 at 1:38 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


How can Yahoo not figure out how to make money off Delicious? It baffles me.

Delicious is the current repository of my linkblog, as well as many linkblogs I read. Linkblogging is sort of a rare form these days, I'll be sad if this shutdown knocks folks offline. Pinboard is promising, though.
posted by Nelson at 1:38 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


I'm less interested in the social aspect of it. I just want a place where I can dump links from multiple browsers that I can easily search for my own use later. I suppose I should try Google Bookmarks or Xmarks.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:38 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


I never used delicious much, but links tend to be somewhat ephemeral anyways (there are a lot of missing images in the portobello post). Losing flickr would be much worse for me, even though I have the photos stored locally and backed up.

I don't think this will impact Yahoo's downward trajectory at this point, since that was basically a given, but it does bode poorly for Google and Chrome and the idea that people will be comfortable living with all their data in the cloud.
posted by snofoam at 1:39 PM on December 16, 2010


I like pinboard, but I missed delicious Firefox extension too much

Yeah it's really not the same. Given the effort Pinboard.in took to maintain API compatibility with Delicious I do wonder how big a deal it would be to convert that extension. I suppose it's too much to hope for that it's a CC license or something?

Woof, I just looked. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised it's got the clickthrough license from hell, should I?
posted by phearlez at 1:40 PM on December 16, 2010


Man, now I'm glad I never started using that site with the awkward "del dot isshy-o dot us" name.
posted by zsazsa at 1:49 PM on December 16, 2010


And it's not like Delicious is a service that people wouldn't pay for - look at Pinboard. On the other hand, I never really felt like Yahoo! deserved Delicious so screw 'em. My ladyfriend still uses Yahoo Mail, but not for much longer if I have anything to do with it.
posted by mike_bling at 1:50 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Hmm... I've been thinking of what to do with my domain hack curio.us. Maybe a del.icio.us clone?
posted by zerosanity at 1:50 PM on December 16, 2010 [13 favorites]


How will I keep track of all my favorite fanfiction now??

Don't know how well it works, but apparently AO3 has some kind of external fic bookmarking ability.
posted by kmz at 1:51 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


This is what Yahoo does, really. Here's hoping it'll be a few more years before there's a post like this about Flickr.
posted by Jairus at 1:51 PM on December 16, 2010


This is almost worse than the way Magnolia went out!
posted by mike_bling at 1:52 PM on December 16, 2010


Yep, this ubiquitous "acquire smaller properties" model works great - keep it up, Titans of the Internet! Swallow up actual useful tools, mis-manage and generally bork said tools, then give up leaving your user base struggling and stranded. Thanks for your leadership, oh Great Ones!
posted by sporb at 1:54 PM on December 16, 2010 [17 favorites]


oy. I'm going to miss it. member for years but like a lot of people, i rarely went back and looked at my old marks. over the past year though I've actually been using my bookmarks a lot.

i might just hack something together with drupal. I got 70% of the way there (took like an hour) once before and gave up when I realized it was easier and more useful just to, you know, use del.icio.us.

i wonder -- shouldn't it be feasible to fork the code for the delicious firefox extension?

A distributed system would be nice..... drives home to me again that relying on the largess of cloud vendors leaves you vulnerable.
posted by lodurr at 1:54 PM on December 16, 2010


Deleted my Yahoo account today. Hope other people consider doing the same.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 1:56 PM on December 16, 2010


No more del.icio.us?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...

Seriously, I use it for work, I use it for play, I use it to remind myself of things to do, I use it to remember things I watched once and want to share... I don't use "physical" (what is non-cloud data? static?) bookmarks at all. I am really upset by this. I too would have happily paid for it - well, compared to losing it.

*goes to download links and rant about the internet*
posted by maryr at 1:57 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I'm over delicious. Somehow, I have gradually shifted to using Twitter, and even Facebook, as my link aggregation mechanism. I think I've been turned off by the front page of delicious, which for years has basically consisted of nothing but heart-stabbing SEO spam...

I will definitely check out pinboard.in.
posted by Jimbob at 1:58 PM on December 16, 2010


Wow, everyone is yelling for the end of Flickr. Kinda silly, given Flickr has a sizable set of paid users, storage costs continue to plummet, and it's still the biggest and best source for Creative Commons licensed photos on the web.

It serves an important niche, and as of right now Picasa and Facebook aren't moving into it, and Smugmug remains a relatively small community compared to Flickr. Flickr will live on until something replaces it.

I'm more surprised that Yahoo hasn't sold them to raise capital. I'm sure Microsoft would love to get hold of Flickr even for the smattering of good developers who've stuck it out there.
posted by dw at 2:04 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


I hate having a Yahoo account to access flickr, so please let them sell off flickr so I never have to think about Yahoo again.
posted by sweetkid at 2:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Well, I just joined pinboard.in. They do seem to be getting hammered a bit, and their only two payment methods -- paypal and amazon -- have their own sets of problems, but I did get in and it looks lovely and there are already Chrome extensions.

Thank you blue for pointing me in (hopefully!) the right place. Never minded paying for something of value.
posted by Bovine Love at 2:06 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Also, we really should have seen this coming based on signs other than suckage, too. One source specifically mentions the traffic APIs. Well, what the hell do you need traffic APIs for if you're outsourcing your search and ad placement to Microsoft? (OK, I don't know about the ad placement, but the search is essentially Bing.)

Point being that they've been rendering more and more of their core business redundant. After they've sliced off the "non core" lines like Delicious, what's left besides a holding company for rebranded Microsoft offerings?
posted by lodurr at 2:06 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


st.upi.d

Like so many people here I have come to rely on del.icio.us

But I think I grokked it was over when they switched to the delicious.com URL.

It's like Yahoo! never really understood the point.

And so:

. .
posted by chavenet at 2:06 PM on December 16, 2010 [5 favorites]


Add me to the Pinboard chorus.

Then add me to your Pinboard network.
posted by defenestration at 2:08 PM on December 16, 2010


I uninstalled the Delicious Firefox extension just yesterday, since it refuses to play nicely with the latest beta. Blame me, this is probably all my fault.
posted by tapeguy at 2:08 PM on December 16, 2010


Me: Xmarks is shutting down!
World: You should switch to delicious.


Me: Now delicious is shutting down!
World: You should switch back to Xmarks.
posted by chairface at 2:09 PM on December 16, 2010 [10 favorites]


Yahoo actually does sports/fantasy sports pretty well.

My fantasy league has been using Yahoo to run the league for the last decade. One big advantage is their roto league setup is insanely flexible -- we run a 6x6 league, AL-only, 12 teams, and early on we found other sites couldn't handle what we do.

I'm sure ESPN has caught up and passed them (though, in playing their fantasy football setup I'm not sure if they really have). But we still drop $100 to Yahoo every year because we understand it and it's willing to understand us.
posted by dw at 2:09 PM on December 16, 2010


I never really used my delicious account but I do use flickr and even though I don't have lots of photos, I would hate to see it die.

So I'm hoping that more flickr users like this guy speak out and Yahoo's CEO takes notice.

AN OPEN LETTER TO CAROL BARTZ, CEO YAHOO INC.
posted by maortiz at 2:10 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


i might just hack something together with drupal. I got 70% of the way there (took like an hour) once before and gave up when I realized it was easier and more useful just to, you know, use del.icio.us.
Don't tempt me to make a distro, man. DON'T TEMPT ME.

In all seriousness, a while back I wired up my Drupal blog to the delicious API and had it snorfing up delicious links every hour. All of the links I posted there are in a nice little table in a database waiting for me to do ... well. something with them? I'm not sure.

Delicious is interesting but a lot of the stuff I do these days requires something more than simple collecting of the links themselves.
posted by verb at 2:12 PM on December 16, 2010


Ach, I'd sorely miss Groups from Yahoo if it were to go. Not that I'm a wildly enthusiastic user - just that I'm on a bunch of mailing lists hosted as groups who have a huge number of interesting but minimally computer literate users (like, one dude we only recently cured his putting in newlines at the end of every line). Yahoo Groups is about all they can handle, and any change would make them fall off the internet.
posted by scruss at 2:14 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


BTW, this just seems appropriate - from the front page of pinterest when I went to check it out - I have no idea how these people got their cats stuck in bookmarks or why.
posted by maryr at 2:14 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


URGH. Warren Ellis sums up my feelings nicely.
posted by grapesaresour at 2:16 PM on December 16, 2010 [6 favorites]


About a year or so ago I was cooking up a way to scrape a Flickr stream to generate nodes on a Drupal site. One of the suggestions I got was to use Yahoo Pipes. It just hit me how lucky I am that I didn't do that.
posted by lodurr at 2:17 PM on December 16, 2010


Wow, Yahoo's CEO was the highest paid in the entire S&P500? For shame.

I really doubt Flickr will go under anytime soon. Last I heard, it's profitable on its own with its subscription model and is probably carrying some of Yahoo's other businesses.
posted by mullingitover at 2:19 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Pinboard is getting massive signups right now. Since I started looking at the site, the price has gone up $0.02
posted by thewalledcity at 2:22 PM on December 16, 2010


it took me a bloody half hour to export my delicious bookmarks because yahoo not only suck at business but apparently at PR as well; their very structured and compassionate announcement at delicious being shut down resulted in everyone is literally rushing for the exit and slowing their servers to a crawl.

i've used delicious every day for five years. yahoo, from the very bottom my heart - go fuck yourselves. anyone remember askme.com? it was the grand daddy of all question sites. kind of like mefi's askme, and it had the most awesome and intelligent people on there. one day the people running it posted a message, along the lines of "sorry guys our parent company got bought and we're getting the axe".

and just like that it went away. forget the loss of all the reputation you build up and the archive of answers. delicious allowed me to subscribe to a network of friends' bookmarks. what about the community that gets obliterated? the critical mass that allows you to turn to your friend one day and say "hey man you should join this site, you'll get the answers you need". gone. i asked a chiropractor one day how bad cracking my fingers was for me, and he gave it to me straight, and i haven't cracked my fingers every again. where is he? how do i thank him?

.
posted by asymptotic at 2:22 PM on December 16, 2010 [5 favorites]


From maortiz's link:
Email? The homepage? search ? mobile? advertising? Yawn.

You know what I don’t see in there? Flickr. Photos. I’m assuming that you consider Flickr one of those “underperforming and non-core products.”
It seems to me that focusing on mediocre, yet currently profitable products at the expense of your innovative best-of-breed offerings is not a path to long-term success.
posted by grouse at 2:24 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Wow, Yahoo's CEO was the highest paid in the entire S&P500? For shame.

Evidence that Yahoo's board doesn't understand good business at its core.
posted by grouse at 2:27 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Happier days and get them while you can.
posted by unliteral at 2:27 PM on December 16, 2010


Aww man, I've used delicious for years and have literally thousands and thousands of bookmarks, this is seriously annoying.
posted by badmoonrising at 2:30 PM on December 16, 2010


Oh my godddddd. I have used Delicious consistently for 5+ years. It never occurred to me that it might just suddenly die one day. I don't really know how to live without it. What am I supposed to do?!

*panics*
posted by Put the kettle on at 2:34 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Springpad is a decent replacement. I mainly use it to collect and tag recipes, and for that it works very nicely.
posted by Hubajube at 2:43 PM on December 16, 2010


Springpad looks nice Hubajube but there's no import or export yet so I'll just bookmark it for later investigation in my del.icio.us… oh! hang on.
posted by unliteral at 2:55 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


This FPP is probably the last thing that I will bookmark using Delicious.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:03 PM on December 16, 2010 [9 favorites]


Argh. I use Delicious so much. That's going to be so annoying. I would pay for Delicious.

Totally agree. I knew when Yahoo didn't screw around that much with the original site that when the other shoe was going to drop, it was really going really hard. Is there something about large corporations that pulls them toward fucking stuff up?

Yahoo: hear me now and believe me later – do not screw with Delicious.
posted by quadog at 3:09 PM on December 16, 2010


NOOOOO! I don't want to live on an internet without del.icio.us!!!
posted by Vavuzi at 3:12 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


After the Magnolia snafu, I hacked together a little script that would download my Delicious data once a day.

Today I joined Pinboard. It can automagically import your delicious data (though it's taking a loooong time, no surprise). At least the data's portable.

I'll miss Delicious, but I'm more concerned about Flickr, which seems harder to replace and certainly has more momentum and community.
posted by adamrice at 3:20 PM on December 16, 2010


Personally, I think del.icio.us is one of the most elegant and interesting concepts the web has spawned so far.

Things to think about:

It brought attention to a new taxonomy (tagging) that could handle the fuzziness of the web. There is a reason directories are pretty much dead online - categorization is very hard and perfect categorization doesn't exist. But with a lot of eyeballs, del.icio.us turned that fuzziness into a strength.

Value at the micro scale with ambient value at the macro (you use it for bookmarks, the world uses your bookmarks for categorization. Twitter has a similar value proposition.)

It's the best directory of the web, simply because of its volume of users. Many websites and services are built or informed by the del.icio.us dataset. If they actually shut it down, all of those site are going to be stuck with old data or switch to an alternative that (currently) doesn't have the same volume/accurateness. That's a loss for everybody.
posted by lubujackson at 3:22 PM on December 16, 2010 [18 favorites]


People are still talking about Flickr community, but you guys must be hanging out on a different Flickr than I am. The Flickr I know was taken over by groups full of lousy HDR and comments full of sparkly gifs a few years back; where are you guys hanging out?
posted by entropicamericana at 3:26 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]




Check your bookmark count when you export - the first time I tried, it was short by ~4000 bookmarks, and then was OK the second time around. I suspect the function is choking due to load.
posted by zamboni at 3:47 PM on December 16, 2010


Was it really 14 years ago that I used to type "http://altavista.digital.com/" when I wanted to find something online? It barely worked... but I was young and I loved it.

The magic started to die when the bought their ".com" and became a "portal". Overture (and Yahoo) have been using it as a random brand, and killing it slowly, ever since.

I Probably haven't used any of the Overture SEs (AllTheWeb, AV etc) in years, but its sad to see them being killed off. They're like my local shops - I never use them, but fondly remember when they we all I had.

Its probably best if I think of them as having been dead since the late 90s, and just remember them how there were.
posted by samworm at 3:53 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Delicious' "Join Now" button still works.

Bastards.
posted by Joe Beese at 3:59 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


About a year or so ago I was cooking up a way to scrape a Flickr stream to generate nodes on a Drupal site. One of the suggestions I got was to use Yahoo Pipes. It just hit me how lucky I am that I didn't do that.

Oh God. Don't even speculate in that direction. I use Yahoo! Pipes to create the RSS feed behind my personal river of news. (Which is insanely slow, 'cause, well, Pipes goes through Yahoo!'s servers—but at least it works.) And Yahoo! Smush.it to "squish" pictures for a photo blog I run. And Delicious to save everythi—oh, right.

I like pinboard, but I missed delicious Firefox extension too much so I switched back.

Damn. Well, that answers that question. That's one of the things I love most about Delicious, that I can just hit Cmd- or Ctrl-D and whatever it is is saved in the cloud. I'd started to get annoyed with the recent update a few days ago, actually, 'cause it made that more difficult. Logging in while attempting to bookmark something doesn't take you to the page to save the bookmark anymore, for instance—you have to hit Cmd-D again to do that after you're logged in. And tags don't save now unless you hit the spacebar in between to make them "pop" into the little tag image. Bad design.

Guh—and it just occurred to me that my years-long wishlist, a lot of which is ultimately intended to go on my wedding registry when I set it up, is also saved in Delicious. Now I've gotta figure out a new solution for that, too... Thanks a lot, Yahoo!
posted by limeonaire at 4:10 PM on December 16, 2010


It's not my bookmarks that I'll mourn. It's being able to browse other people's tags to find fic. I just can't see that critical mass settling anywhere else.
posted by Karmakaze at 4:13 PM on December 16, 2010 [6 favorites]


Guh—and it just occurred to me that my years-long wishlist, a lot of which is ultimately intended to go on my wedding registry when I set it up, is also saved in Delicious. Now I've gotta figure out a new solution for that, too...

Amazon Universal Wish List? You could create an alias account if you don't want it mixed in with your regular Amazon wish list.
posted by runningwithscissors at 4:15 PM on December 16, 2010


Yahoo, historically, has done an amazing job of acquiring products, never doing anything with them and then sinking them to the bottom of the ocean,

It's like STEAM for me- I buy all these games and then never play with them.
posted by GilloD at 4:18 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


> I have 10,585 bookmarks on there...which, exported, is only like 2 MB.
> posted by limeonaire at 4:05 PM on December 16 [3 favorites +] [!]

I started accumulating bookmarks when the browser was NCSA Mosaic (and the Windows version was 3.1 and the Linux kernel version was 1.0.13. Did they have Macs then?). It now comes in at 18,187 links, and that's after being checked regularly with AM-deadlink. I carry it around on a flash memory drive and pretty much the second thing I do every morning at work (after getting coffee) is poke the stick into a usb port and sync up the local copy with Vice Versa (free version). Last thing before leaving, sync up the portable copy the same way, copying out any I happened to add during the day.

First time I ever heard "the cloud" mentioned I thought hey, what a great place to store all the data you don't particularly care if you lose. But in the end it turned out I don't have any of that.
posted by jfuller at 4:20 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


Heh. I love this addition to the end of Pinboard's list of features to implement:

• Get acquired by Yahoo and slowly grow useless
posted by limeonaire at 4:23 PM on December 16, 2010 [10 favorites]


I'm sad to see delicious go, but...well, actually, no. I'm not really sad. If anything, I hope the imminent diaspora gives the competition a solid boost. Delicious was becoming a dinosaur even if it was beloved by many.

Chrome users can use the Pinboard extension which is pretty much an exact copy of the excellent felicious.

I signed up for Pinboard this afternoon. Still waiting on my data import; there's apparently a pretty long queue. Sure, it's not free, but neither was Mefi! Think of this as your opportunity to get a really low user ID (read: signup fee) before it gets all popular and and everyone starts bookmarking nothing but SLYTs and Onion articles.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 4:23 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Oh, man. Delicious was my cookbook. I had well over 1000 recipes, searchable by ingredient, method, season... It worked so well. This just sucks.
posted by mkim at 4:24 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


Ditto mkim - well, fewer recipes, but still.

I went ahead and gave Pinboard $7.22. By the time I decided the price had risen over a dime from when I first checked it out. It's all the way up to $7.43 now.
posted by maryr at 4:31 PM on December 16, 2010


mkim: It's not gone yet. Go export your bookmarks.
posted by zamboni at 4:32 PM on December 16, 2010




there are worse things than being DDOS'ed by people trying to give you money


And the crazy thing is, that money probably could have gone to Delicious if Yahoo had played their cards right. People are obviously willing to pay for an online bookmark service.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 4:37 PM on December 16, 2010 [11 favorites]


Why depend on other services for keeping your bookmarks? I used to run Insipid on my own server to catalog my bookmarks...

Until my server crashed and I lost them all...
posted by aGee at 4:38 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


Thanks for forcing me over to Google Bookmarks, assholes.

Funny, I forgot Google had Bookmarks, even though I've been using them every day for years at work in a Google Homepage widget. I guess that can replace my beloved Firefox Delicious Sidebar add-on (glad to see Google has me covered there).

Now I just need a similar Chrome extension and I'll be all Google, all the time. I consider this neither a good nor bad thing -- at least until Google follows Yahoo into that inevitable goodnight.
posted by coolguymichael at 4:38 PM on December 16, 2010


It's like STEAM for me- I buy all these games and then never play with them.

I dunno, with Steam I'll always get these random awesome bargains for $3 or so when they have a sale, that I end up playing a lot and they make up for the other $20 of random titles.
posted by Artw at 4:40 PM on December 16, 2010


Is there a way to synch Delicious back with the regular Firefox bookmarks? I'm looking at my Firefox "Bookmarks Menu" for the first time in years, and there's a delicious folder in there that looks like it was set up when I first installed the delicious addon. Would be great if there was a way to get my current delicious bookmarks back in there -- the export just creates an unsorted html file, and that doesn't do anyone much good.
posted by muckster at 4:51 PM on December 16, 2010


P.S.: it's still sinking in just how much this blows, exactly.
posted by muckster at 4:51 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Zamboni, thanks I did export them. I just don't know what to do with them now! I guess I better try Pinboard before the price gets any higher. Maryh, how is their search?
posted by mkim at 4:54 PM on December 16, 2010


I've barely ever even looked at Delicious and didn't even know they were a Yahoo property. Finding this out, it's not too surprising that they mismanaged and eventually gave up on it.

I really don't get Yahoo. Ten years ago it seemed like they were really going places. Now they're like the miserable floundering small-town newspaper in my neck of the woods that's trying to monetize their website by making people pay to read articles online. You can't even use POP or even forward mail from your Yahoo account without signing up for their "pro" service (which I found out recently because I had to sign up for a Yahoo account in order to sign up for Flickr so I could put some pictures in the MeFi Mall, ARGH, and by the way I still despise the New Flickr forcing me to whitelist five different Yahoo domains in NoScript in order to function). I may be woefully uninformed, and if so I hope somebody here can educate me, but why on Earth would anybody PAY for POP and forwarding when you can get it for free with EVERY OTHER EMAIL PROVIDER EVERYWHERE?
posted by Gator at 5:00 PM on December 16, 2010


Their sports coverage is actually pretty decent, and their front page, while still full of crap, is less crapful than ESPN or Sporting News.

Yes, I really like Yahoo's sports coverage. It's where I go to check scores and get news. It's relatively crap-free and their blogs are good. I hope they keep that stuff around.

And Flickr -- the fact that it was left off of that slide entirely is odd. I imagine it must be profitable, but I wonder how much? Worth it to a big company trying to trim the fat?
posted by statolith at 5:02 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Pinboard does not support tag bundles.

I wouldn't know how to start the day, but for my tag bundles. Me, and my 7380 (neatly bundled) bookmarks, are lost.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 5:04 PM on December 16, 2010




"People are still talking about Flickr community, but you guys must be hanging out on a different Flickr than I am. The Flickr I know was taken over by groups full of lousy HDR and comments full of sparkly gifs a few years back; where are you guys hanging out?"

Well, the main thing is to stay away from the sparkly gifs groups (I hate those gifs) - which is really more about personality and popularity, though I'm sure they're fun for the users. I belong to something like 500 groups which I enjoy looking at during commercials on tv, on the phone, etc. Random things like Day of the Dead celebrations, Cemetery sculpture, places I'd love to travel but aren't going any time soon, and artwork and costumes of the Plague Doctor. Not to mention all the great pop culture stuff like old neon art signs, old advertising from magazines, and bizarre roadside attractions. It's been a fun place to bump into people who like the same sort of thing that I do. I'd never have found out that so many people enjoy looking at the image of the replica Stonehenge in Texas that includes giant moai. And I won't even get into the thousands of Wow screenshots I've got in there. Or all the fun (and funny) things on etsy that are also on Flickr.

Example - I was reading an old article from the 70s on the aging character who was the head of Coca Cola, and it described the plantation he'd purchased and retired to. It was in an area of the south I'd not easily be able to visit, but I was curious as to what it looked like. A single search on Flickr and I found someone who'd visited it on one of the few days it's open to the public - it's a wildlife research type place now, but the buildings are still there from the plantation/Coca Cola owner days.

I don't know that it's exactly a community in the same way other sites are - people don't trade comments as much as we all look at each other's photos. I rarely use the discussion areas.
posted by batgrlHG at 5:09 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Pinboard does not support tag bundles.

I have over 6000 tags, about 5000 of which are in bundles. Pinboard's lack of tag bundle support was of brief concern to me. Then I realised that I don't actually use tag bundles. Once you get over a certain number of bookmarks, and homonymic tags start piling up, they're really just organisation for the sake of organisation.
posted by zamboni at 5:09 PM on December 16, 2010


Bummed as is everyone, but also recognizing that Delicous (I still want to type del.icio.us) has really suffered for its neglect under Yahoo.

Also, here's a pretty slick one liner for exporting your bookmarks from Delicious if you have curl installed
posted by hwestiii at 5:14 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Wildly optimistic of me, but the powers that be were a little bit ambiguous on whether delicious bites the dust:

http://www.geekosystem.com/yahoo-shutting-down-delicious/

Maybe the uproar will be heard by them? This is what hope is for!
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 5:14 PM on December 16, 2010


Oh.

“The whole Delicious team was fired yesterday, according to a friend who works at Yahoo.”
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 5:16 PM on December 16, 2010


Can anyone recommend a good firefox extension for this that stores the bookmarks on one's computer? i.e. non-cloud?

It would be handy to have all one's bookmarks laid out in a webpage, as opposed to via the generic bookmarks menu.
posted by sebastienbailard at 5:28 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


One good thing to come out of this debacle: I've discovered that Britta Gustafson, that brave soldier of an intern who used to wrangle the delicious customer support forums, has a perfectly lovely blog.
posted by zamboni at 5:29 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Before Google came along and ate their breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, midnight snack as well as their cupboards there was one thing I used to use Yahoo for. It remains on the site as an atavistic feature that I return to because it is still the best.

People search. It's been around for years and must have access to some freakish database because it does excellent telephone and address lookups.
posted by jeremias at 5:38 PM on December 16, 2010


• Get acquired by Yahoo and slowly grow useless
posted by limeonaire at 7:23 PM on 12/16


That's actually been there since the beginning. The guy behind Pinboard is pretty hilarious.
posted by defenestration at 5:40 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


I don't actually use tag bundles

I do. Did.

The firefox delicious extension supports bundles, and I have a bundle called "frequent" where I put all my hourly internet obsessions, including metafilter, which is tagged with "daily_general".

When I wanted to check that group of sites, I could do an 'open in tabs' on that tag, under the 'Frequent" bundle, and catch up on what might be new. It was the combo of delicious and firefox that was so good.

BTW, I appreciate the info on dead.licious, but it crashes before reading all 7380 bookmarks, and then does not 'resume' but starts over. Yay. Made it up to about 2000 so far.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 5:43 PM on December 16, 2010


If you are looking for a replacement for Del.icio.us I would suggest Zootool. I have been using it for a while and love it. Its more of a visual bookmark system but it's really well done has browser plugins. They also allow importing of Del.icio.us bookmarks so its easy to transfer.
posted by lilkeith07 at 5:53 PM on December 16, 2010


I can't wait for the A&E show "Hoarders" to do an episode on bookmarks.
posted by birdherder at 5:56 PM on December 16, 2010 [13 favorites]


Oh fer Chrissake. I just signed up two days ago!
posted by Adridne at 5:59 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Well that sucks. If they're going to shut things down why bother buying them in the first place?
posted by carter at 6:04 PM on December 16, 2010


"Describe the process involved in creating for yourself a social bookmarking site on Delicious, Connotea or other Web 2.0 site in order for you to catch and retain your favourite websites. Marks – 5%"
That's a direct cut'n'paste from an 'advanced' info retrieval course I've recently done. I was reading MeFi, goofing off from answering that exact question, when I saw this post.

Considering that Delicious was the only one actually covered in the coursework, I'm wondering if I'm about to be up for an easy 5%…
posted by Pinback at 6:05 PM on December 16, 2010


Son of a bitch.

Ha, it just occurred to me that I only discovered del.icio.us because of you, stavros, lo those many years (and 12,275 bookmarks) ago. I think I found bloglines the same way. Thanks for nothing, dick.
posted by yerfatma at 6:19 PM on December 16, 2010 [6 favorites]


Looks like it's time to boot up a VM of Windows 7, grab Migratr and – sadly – mass-move my Flickr sets over to Picasa. #theendisnear
posted by hrbrmstr at 6:19 PM on December 16, 2010


Man, I am so disappointed with this.

I use delicious all the time. I have a sidebar in my browser with my daily bookmarks for uni, home, emails, news, etc. I bookmark EVERYTHING, and have 20k + bookmarks. I don't know how many times I've gone into my personal database of tags and found useful bookmarks from the past that I've tagged. I also use it to search for interesting articles by tag name, and also look through interesting people's bookmarks. Looks like I'll be moving over to pinboard. Hopefully it'll have an awesome community of taggers there as well.
posted by ollyollyoxenfree at 6:45 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Exporting my 5K bookmarks from Delicious was easy.

Importing them into Chrome wasn't difficult.

Getting them into Google Bookmarks was a pain in the ass.

Require Firefox with a Google Toolbar installed? WTF?

Still, I can not bring myself to pay for online bookmarking. I just can't.
posted by Joe Beese at 7:08 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


This is such a shame. A lot of times Delicious was a better search engine than Google. Often, if I wanted to find quality links about a topic I had very little experience with, the first thing I would do was type http://delicious.com/popular/...
posted by AceRock at 7:13 PM on December 16, 2010


Bookmarks? Lemme tell you about bookmarks.

In the days before home computers, there was newspapers & magazines. And there was people who would find a story or a picture they wanted to 'keep', so they would cut the story or picture out with a razor blade (which at that time were considered so harmless they could even be carried on aireoplanes) and stick said item into some kind of file. The newspapers and magazines were on cuttable paper, did I say that?

So after a while, the file, being, like, physical, would get pretty big, So the person would put the file into a cardboard box, and put the box in the cellar, and start a new file.

And after some years, there were lots of boxes in the cellar, and the husband (person was in fact the mother of my SO at the time--this is not one of them hypothelogical or fictiforous narrations) noted that the boxes were something of a fire hazard, and would from time to time throw out a couple of the older boxes. And his wife never noticed, or at least never mentioned it.

Fact #1: Most of the stuff that gets bookmarked is never revisited. It gets forgotten. It shoudl.
Fact #2: You really need a husband to pitch that stuff once in a while (This is not a sufficient reason to marry, though)
Fact #3: Even if you have a husband, on the internet, no-one can tell which box of unreferenced crap is older, and a candidate for excision.
Fact #4: This is like losing all your stuff that you never much messed with anyway.
See Stuff by George Carlin, or look for the YouTube versions if reading makes your eyes hurt.

So think of the end of delicious as an early Christmas present from the Past-Is-Dead fairy.
Or spend the weekend editing bookmarks, or you'll never make that creme-brulee recipe again.
posted by hexatron at 7:13 PM on December 16, 2010 [9 favorites]


> Can anyone recommend a good firefox extension for this that stores the bookmarks
> on one's computer? i.e. non-cloud?
>
> It would be handy to have all one's bookmarks laid out in a webpage, as opposed
> to via the generic bookmarks menu.

I haven't been able to find one, and it's not from lack of looking. However, one day I had a notion that has been so successful, for me anyway, that I've quit looking.

Use your filesystem. Browsers can browse a filesystem as easily as they can browse the web. Instead of keeping urls in a big page of (pretty damn odd) html as FF used to, or in a database as it does now, store them IE-style as individual URL shortcuts stored in a dedicated directory tree. That way you get to manage your collection with any tool ever written for managing a filesystem--of which there are zillions. (Not that you need to download a special tool, Windows comes with a perfectly good filesystem manager, as do both KDE and Gnome.)

Categorize them in folders and sub-folders and sub-sub-folders each with a descriptive name. Move them from folder to folder as your categories change, or duplicate them easily in different categories. Plus, filesystems can contain other stuff that browsers can deal with, such as special-purpose html files full of links on one subject (hence a lot smaller than "bookmarks.html"), or even just text files full of lists of urls. Is your bookmarks filesystem enormous (as mine is) so that browsing it gets to be a pain? Sprinkle it with shortcuts to other often-used parts of the filesystem. Your browser can follow 'em. And on and on.

Note, when I say "your browser" that means any browser: IE or FF or Opera or Galeon or whatever you fancy, every one of 'em can access the bookmarks in your bookmarks filesystem. End of exporting bookmarks from browser A and and importing 'em into browser B. Forever. (Also, one in the eye for Mozilla's highly dislikeable idea of keeping important stuff in non-editable--read "closed"--databases in recent FF versions. That, me boys, is not the *nix way.)

Oh yeah. So how do you make a single-url bookmark file? IE does this natively, of course. Firefox (Windows or Linux) has Deskcut.
posted by jfuller at 7:16 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Heh, now I feel validated. When I went looking for a place to store bookmarks online years ago, I ended up going with Netvouz rather than del.icio.us. Mainly because at the time, del.icio.us wouldn't do an alphabetical sort of bookmarks, which bugged the hell out of me. They added an alphabetical sort later, but I was already entrenched in Netvouz by then. Netvouz doesn't really have the social aspect of del.icio.us, but I wasn't interested in that, I just wanted a place to store bookmarks online so I could access them from any internet-connected computer.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:28 PM on December 16, 2010


Netvouz is not accepting new registrations at this time.
posted by Joe Beese at 7:34 PM on December 16, 2010


Didn't realize that. Now I feel even more superior than I did before.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:34 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


You know, it's not the bookmarking function of delicious I'll miss. I mean, yes, I will. It was handy, not having to move my bookmarks from machine to machine. Really handy to have them when I was using a borrowed machine. It's the browsing other people's bookmarks I'll miss.

Delicious is the only aggregator of things-strangers-find-interesting (other than Metafilter, I guess) that ever held my interest after the first couple of weeks. Plus, I have some friends who bookmarked some fucking interesting things.
posted by crush-onastick at 7:39 PM on December 16, 2010 [8 favorites]


hexatron: "So think of the end of delicious as an early Christmas present from the Past-Is-Dead fairy."

Absolutely correct, if by past you mean future, and by fairy you mean witch.

jfuller sums up my sentiments: Delicious is the only aggregator of things-strangers-find-interesting (other than Metafilter, I guess) that ever held my interest after the first couple of weeks. Plus, I have some friends who bookmarked some fucking interesting things.

Delicious had a brilliant community. The people who used it regularly were a different class of internet user, extremely savvy, and having access to their bookmarks offered a tremendous insight into the state of the web and the state of the art in a wide array of topics.

Its demise still sinking in for me. Shutting it down is like taking a wrecking ball to the Smithsonian. I have a hard time putting my disgust with Yahoo into words.
posted by mullingitover at 8:01 PM on December 16, 2010 [10 favorites]


and by jfuller I mean crush-onastick.
posted by mullingitover at 8:01 PM on December 16, 2010


Delicious?!!!!??? Shit. My entire life is backed up to that site. First Bloglines now Delicious. You know how it takes years to mold that spot on the couch or your mattress to fit your needs so that it's just perfectly comfortable and it's YOURS? Almost as if you had a hand in constructing it? First I did that with Bloglines and then I did it with Delicious. And, the thing is, once you choose a site and mold it, there's no other site that comes close to meeting your needs. You have to start from scratch learning a new site that isn't remotely intuitive for the first year or so, and it always seems to be that you're kicked out of sites that you depend on two or three at a time, so that you really have to hustle to find acceptible replacements for multiple sites at the same time before you lose all your efforts. This is why I'm beginning to really find the internet useless. Yahoo best never close down Flickr (at least for pro-members).
posted by Mael Oui at 8:06 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


I came over here to see if the news had been posted about Delicious (of course it had) and joined the crowd signing up for Pinboard. The only quibble I have so far is the godawful colors of text on other people's pages - some unreadable green-yellow mix for "copy to mine" under each bookmark and a weird brown-green for the tag cloud on the right. How the heck do I make that text just plain black?? I've got to think there's a setting somewhere, because that's a horrible design choice, and that doesn't fit in with the rest of the design aesthetic of the site.

Oh, and for those tracking time/price, I paid $7.60 at 10:13pm EST.
posted by booksherpa at 8:18 PM on December 16, 2010


Also, one in the eye for Mozilla's highly dislikeable idea of keeping important stuff in non-editable--read "closed"--databases in recent FF versions. That, me boys, is not the *nix way

Actually, those databases are just SQLite databases: an open source embeddable lightweight relational database engine. If you really want to edit them outside of Firefox, you can use the normal sqlite command line interface and issue SQL commands to your heart's content. I recommend the SQLite Manager Firefox extension, which provides handy access to the SQLite command line from within Firefox.
posted by zachlipton at 8:20 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


Those bloody Yahoo! bastards. I hate them with the passion of the heat a thousand burning suns and I suspected this might happen when they bought them. This is why I'm hosting all my own images instead of using Flickr which I'm sure is either doomed or headed for ad laden uselessness.

hexatron writes "So think of the end of delicious as an early Christmas present from the Past-Is-Dead fairy."

Screw that. Just this morning I search for and found a bookmark in del.icio.us that I'd put there years ago. This is a regular occurrence. del.icio.us is the perfect bookmark management tool for me and I'm going to be sad and angry to see it go.
posted by Mitheral at 8:29 PM on December 16, 2010 [5 favorites]


Grrrr.. I've been trying to export my 15,000 delicious links but the download keeps 'corrupting'.. I don't know anything about command line crap and coding, so, if I can manage to back up my life's work (heh), it's got to be super easy or not at all. These we're-closing-down-this-site announcements always seem to come at really stressful, busy times and they never address how long you have to save your information, so that you're stressed, overly busy, and sick (or, at least I am), and then you've got a whole other level of stress to add to everything else. And people (that I know) wonder why I'm turning against technology. I HATE forced obsolescence and that is ALL technology is anymore.. whether it be television/movie playback, computers, phones, other communication gizmos, and the internet itself. We're told that all of these products and websites will make our lives better, easier, more enriching.. and we're encouraged to embrace them, yet everything is yanked away from us right as we come to depend on it. In the end, this is all just extra frustration, less privacy, and a money/time vaccuum. We're being lied to in every way, you know. None of these technologies and sites are worth shit. Yet, if you don't instantly upgrade to the new Thing, you're some kind of freak. Fuck that, already.
posted by Mael Oui at 8:50 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Regarding Netvouz, self-registration is disabled, but you can e-mail the people at Netvouz and ask them to manually set up an account for you.
posted by reenum at 8:50 PM on December 16, 2010


I will also really miss Delicious. I've already exported my bookmarks, but now I'm wondering if there's an easy way to export or save the (public) bookmarks of other users (i.e. not my own bookmarks). One low-tech way is to download their Delicious pages, but it's not very efficient for accounts that have thousands of bookmarks... I regularly check out and search the links collected by a number of other Delicious users, and it'd be sad to lose access to those resources.
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 9:04 PM on December 16, 2010




I guess I'm the only one here with about ten bookmarks (all of which are saved under "Bookmarks" in Firefox) and no idea of what Delicious or the other bookmarking services really do. If MetaFilter, which probably accounts for at least 75% of my internet use, ever goes under I might as well throw my laptop in the trash.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:23 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


hwestiiii: Also, here's a pretty slick one liner for exporting your bookmarks from Delicious if you have curl installed.

Thanks, hwestiii. Works fine with wget as well.
posted by russilwvong at 10:16 PM on December 16, 2010


A quick note for those lamenting the lack of the Firefox extension: there is a Google Chrome plugin with relatively smooth Pinboard support. I've had an account for ages but hadn't gotten around to using it.
posted by verb at 10:22 PM on December 16, 2010


Aaugh!

Discovered Delicious through Mefi a few months back. Imported the haphazard stack of bookmarks from my browser and been loving it. Tags are a wonderful way to think about categorization, much better than folders. Just going through and tagging everything has been a great learning experience.

Now this. Export of bookmarks from Delicious was easy, but I've spent a good chunk of the day trying to import the damn things into Google Bookmarks. Finally got the links, but all the tags disappeared! So now I've got to retag 900 bookmarks. 200 down so far, 700 to go...
posted by Kevin Street at 10:36 PM on December 16, 2010


Hm. Well, I've signed up at a few places to try things out. I can't believe I just a few days ago went through all the falderah of creating a stoopid stoopid Yahoo account for my husband just so I could sign him up for delicious. Painful.

I'm not going to spring for for Pinboard. The price is up to nearly $8, so double that for two accounts, and I don't even know if it's going to be significantly more useful than one of the other options. I don't think it's going to get the critical mass of something like delicious because of the fee, so if I'm going to be using something more for bookmarking and less for turbobrowsing, well, that's a pretty expensive bookmark app to me. So far I've joined zootool, diigo, trailmeme, pearltrees, and (I think?) favbot. You register at favbot, and then you wait for them to send you an invitation? odd.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out, where the masses will migrate.

Yahoo is just monstrous. I was on the verge of getting a Pro account at Flickr when they bought it, so I didn't. I was so pissed off at being forced to get a Yahoo account and sign in with it that I just lost the will to follow up. All I care about in the entire Yahoo universe is Flickr and Delicious ... and now it's down to Flickr. How soon before they start pouring the gasoline on that, I wonder?
posted by taz at 11:24 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


waxpancake: Stunned by people too cheap to pay the $7.35 one-time fee for Pinboard.in, even though they really want it. Free is myopic.

People love free, but from blogger's meltdown years ago to this, 'free' has always been a sign of danger to me. The fact that Pinboard.in does cost money is one reason I joined.
posted by justgary at 11:45 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


Heh. Well, I'm not too cheap, although I really am too poor at the moment to spend money on anything that's not essential (hello, Greek economic meltdown!). I have no reason to feel that I need Pinboard right now. I liked browsing delicious, and I found delicious very useful for my personal needs, but I don't know anything about Pinboard or what it can do that some of the other sites can't. Right now, I'd be joining because there are 86 MeFites signed up, which would be an okay reason to give it a shot if I really didn't need to think about casual money at all. That's not the case, though.

I think there are a lot of people who have to think that way, and a lot of people who don't like making financial transactions online, and a lot of people in other countries for whom such a fee isn't such a tiny detail, and etc. Delicious is so popular that some application is probably going to inherit the larger part of its users, and I kind of doubt it will be Pinboard, though I may well be wrong. It seems like Pinboard is definitely standing at the head of the class for the "elite user" or "power user," for whatever reason (which I imagine we'll be learning more about), but that's not me, either. I'm more Prol and weakish.

all that said, I would pay five bucks right now to keep my Delicious account, if it meant that delicious would be taken up by a group that was committed to it.
posted by taz at 1:13 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Oh! But I am myopic! I don't even know how he could tell that online. ( ゚д゚)
posted by taz at 1:21 AM on December 17, 2010


Wow, this is a drag. To me this was the best of the web 2.0 because it was silent and passive social networking yet still personal and a powerful tool. Like many have said here, it's not the loss of a link saving site that irks so much as it's the loss of a place where such a diverse bunch of people had accounts to which you could subscribe. I fear with any dissolution of the service that easy access to such diversity will be lost for good in a way, as geeks and bibliophiles and arts people etc end up heading off to different sites because there's now so many. I loved being able to discover people by their streams and by their taxonomic flair. It's that simple tagging architecture that let you discover so much without the pressure of having to meet 'n talk and reciprocate. I know twitter has something of a comparable dimension to it, but it's no replacement. I can't believe they couldn't make money from delicious. It's astonishing really.

.
posted by peacay at 1:45 AM on December 17, 2010 [2 favorites]


.

Its the end of an era. Freemium, web 2.0, the whole rise of the blogosphere and the hyperactive read write web. Imho at least. I moved to San Francisco right after a plunge into a world of del.icio.us and typepad and bloglines and blogspot and you could hear ajax on every corner while ruby ran on her rails. Who was that guy with half a tangerine on his business card renting a desk upstairs? If the lights are flickring out then what is now there? Facebook to the max, wait, let me take taht spoon out of my mouth.
posted by The Lady is a designer at 2:51 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


.
posted by Mick at 3:18 AM on December 17, 2010


I totally *heart* delicious and I'm gutted it's being killed off.

I hopped on the pinboard wagon because, honestly, I just want tagged bookmarks and a toolbar widget. I do not want to network my bookmarks with yours so they can date or whatever.

So I gave Pinboard my $7.77 and imported my delicious bookmarks. I am still getting the Due to massive traffic today, imports may take several hours to complete. Sorry for the delay! message. It is six hours later. I am bereft of bookmarks. I am so sad.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:20 AM on December 17, 2010


Also: bereft of my $7.77.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:21 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Oh dear, that's good to hear though. I won't try Pinboard now but I wonder if i should have moved earlier and by delaying missed the boat ?
posted by The Lady is a designer at 3:29 AM on December 17, 2010


One good thing to come out of this debacle: I've discovered that Britta Gustafson, that brave soldier of an intern who used to wrangle the delicious customer support forums, has a perfectly lovely blog.

Oh wow, hello! Thanks! Back when I was 16 a couple of IRC acquaintances started chatting about this nutty idea for a multiplayer bookmarking site, and a couple years later I started working for my friends at del.icio.us, Inc. and soon Yahoo! Delicious as the main support/community person for four years, but just part-time (with full-time summers) because I was in college. Working on Delicious was an amazing and wonderful thing for me, and I am so happy that the product has lasted as long as it did. It's done a lot of good for a lot of people's lives, with few negative effects, and you can't say that about every website.

I am fond of coming up with elaborate metaphors for describing Delicious, aaaaaand I've been thinking about why I find it so important. OK. So. The web is this chaotic labyrinth of hyperlinks, constantly being constructed and deconstructed by a zillion people including you and me — how do you keep track of where you've been so that you can find your way forward efficiently? You can save a few bookmarks in your browser, but that's just miniature chaos, or maybe you try writing a web-log, but that's too much work. Delicious gives you a thread to carry, orderly and lightweight. You keep track of the corners that were worth visiting, and you leave the thread visible to help your friends find their way too. People who spend a lot of time in labyrinths need some form of thread; there are other valid tools, but Delicious was one of the first and most focused (although not the easiest to learn how to really use). I always feel less frustrated about the vast complexity of the web when I take the time to bookmark some of it; my carefully ordered bookmarks and tags are a coherent way of processing and absorbing an infinitely messy world. The original vision of Delicious was as an outboard brain, and I am glad to have shared mine and been able to read my Delicious network every day; it has taught me a large amount of what I know. And probably half the rest was learned from a number of fantastic coworkers at Delicious.

Anyway, Pinboard is run by a friend I trust and has my full endorsement. And I hope to see a MetaTalk thread at some point where we can all list our new bookmarking usernames, wherever they may be — there was an old thread like that for Delicious usernames, and it was fun to check out people's bookmarks.

How will I keep track of all my favorite fanfiction now??

AO3 has a very basic bookmarking feature but with the potential for a lot more; Dreamwidth has something like that too; Pinboard is perfectly fine with fic bookmarks; there is more discussion going on in fandom right now.
posted by dreamyshade at 3:30 AM on December 17, 2010 [17 favorites]


I also posted this in the AskMe thread, but it might be useful for someone here.

I haven't tested this, but it looks interesting: a javascript bookmarklet which uploads exported Delicious bookmarks to a Google Bookmarks account.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 3:31 AM on December 17, 2010 [6 favorites]


Oh, I should clarify that I chose to end my contract with Delicious a whole year ago; I wasn't part of any layoffs.
posted by dreamyshade at 3:34 AM on December 17, 2010


I was just thinking about all of this and I think that I am going to take the decision not to social bookmark anymore. Delicious was a time and place that may now be over, on the interwebz.
posted by The Lady is a designer at 3:47 AM on December 17, 2010


And I hope to see a MetaTalk thread at some point where we can all list our new bookmarking usernames

Here you go.
posted by ceiriog at 3:55 AM on December 17, 2010


dreamyshade, thanks for sharing - and for working on Delicious!

I rarely used social features, but Delicious/del.icio.us was an integral part of how I used the web. After learning about the imminent shutdown, I sat there thinking about another way to organize links and information, and couldn't come up with anything even remotely satisfying. And this comes, what, a couple of months after Bloglines announcing its demise? Ouch. (I know, it's still alive, but I migrated to Netvibes after the announcement and burned all the bridges.)

5 minutes ago I coughed up 7.92$ for Pinboard. I hope this works out better than my love affair with Delicious.

(My sympathies go to the Delicious dev team. Getting laid off right before Christmas AND after completing a major upgrade of the system... Must've hurt.)
posted by gakiko at 4:02 AM on December 17, 2010


In case anyone's interested in the growth at Pinboard since the Delicious announcement, I've been keeping a publicly-editable spreadsheet here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tcnzaVhho8wOcDgWZkcuBAA&hl=en#gid=0

The only field you should change is the yellow one (current cost of subscription), and you get that datum from here: http://pinboard.in/signup/.

It'll tell you how many people have signed up since the announcement (+/- 9) and the amount that Pinboard has made off of basic accounts in that time. Currently, it's at 1,050 new users, with a rough amount in of $7,775.25.
posted by Alt F4 at 4:13 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Oh, bah. Here's a clickable link: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tcnzaVhho8wOcDgWZkcuBAA&hl=en#gid=0
posted by Alt F4 at 4:14 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Years ago, some kids built a really cool treehouse in this abandoned lot near my house. They invited some of their friends to hang out with them, and soon enough a culture grew up inside this little lofi outpost. People would leave these tiny scraps of paper everywhere, like clues, and you could drop in and check them out, see what people were interested in. My friend Charlie introduced me to it; at first, I couldn't understand why I would possibly want to join this silliness. Then after a few visits I realized that Hey! this is really fun, and when I found a shortcut from my house to the tree I visited it everyday.

Some time later, this old man bought the property where the tree sat. The kids that built it went off to college or something, but it didn't matter, because the treehouse culture stayed the same. The old man repainted the treehouse, and cleaned up the spelling of the club name, but other than that he left well enough alone. At first everyone was surprised, but soon we settled back into a comfortable groove, getting to know each other in that limited but essential way that we enjoyed, through the little scraps that grew like weeds all over the inside of the club.

Years passed. If anyone showed the merest glimmer of interest in what I started thinking of as my treehouse, I would proudly show them all the scraps that I had collected, how I had organized them, and what cool things other people had shown me. I encouraged them to visit the treehouse, and some of them did and began having fun. We thought it would never end.

One day the old man, without warning, decided to make some changes to the ladder that you use to climb into the tree. Everybody was surprised, like, this isn't the same ladder that I'm used to, but the old man still cared enough to add a few rungs after his first attempt, trying to satisfy everyone. For those of us having been clubmembers since the old days, we remembered back to when the old man first bought the property and realized that if we had gotten used to those changes, then surely this too would pass and we'd never miss the old ladder. Some people even liked the new ladder better. Other people were happy because, regardless of the changes, the old man was paying attention to the property again, and isn't that a good thing? Maybe he'll make some other neato additions! Wouldn't a terracotta roof look nice?

Maybe a week after the ladder change, I heard some screaming outside of my living room window. I scrambled out of the house to see what the fuss was about. A circle of friends and strangers were standing in the back lot, some stuck numb with horror, others weeping quietly: the old man, ignorant of the culture we were so proud of, had decided to pour gasoline on the tree and burn the whole thing, clubhouse and all, to the ground. Where was the fire department? Some of us were able to retrieve our scraps, but where would we go with them? There was a new treehouse down the block, but they charged to get in. Besides, nothing was going to be as comfortable, as easy, as perfect as our clubhouse. Even though we didn't build it ourselves, or ever spend any money on club dues, we spent time in there, which should count for something. There might not be a price tag on community, but that doesn't mean it's worthless, right?

.

I hope that old man dies the slow, painful death he so richly deserves. Being torn apart by cannibals would be appropriate, I think. I feel really bad for his kids, who don't deserve such a fate this close to Xmas. I feel bad for the guys that built the treehouse in the first place. I feel bad for myself because, even if I accumulated lots of scraps that I never looked at again, the treehouse was a novel way to mark the passing of time. I planned trips in that treehouse, organized my gift buying, concocted elaborate schemes, and learned an awful lot of things that I never would have otherwise by looking at what other people had collected. Not once did I feel like I was bothering anyone else with my weird obsessions, because they only had to pay attention if they wanted to.

Sigh.

I think it's time I learned how to build a treehouse of my own.
posted by Chichibio at 4:31 AM on December 17, 2010 [13 favorites]


limeonaire: "Anyone know of a stand-alone tool I could host on my own Apache server that would do the same basic things Delicious does?

I'm way late to the thread with this, but I'm running Scuttle as a self-hosted delicious replacement. It works well for bookmarking and (I just learned) even has an associated firefox plugin (which I will be installing post-haste.)
posted by namewithoutwords at 5:05 AM on December 17, 2010 [3 favorites]


The other side of the coin for me is that I've used delish as something of a structural support for my blog. With >1000 posts that are all not only tagged but also thoroughly described, it provided a richer and more precise method for refinding things. Not to mention the constant hum of traffic from delicious. Shiiiiiiiiit. Sure I can export everything but that's only a part of the loss.
posted by peacay at 5:07 AM on December 17, 2010


Not very surprising. Yahoo was started as an engineering company back in the day, developing tools to use the Web. The founders, both engineers, defined the direction of the company with CEO Tim Koogle. Then Terry Semel, an Hollywood exec, took over and reoriented the company towards media and content instead of technology. The strategy may or may not have been good, but he was a disastrous manager, and left to be replaced by founder Jerry Yang, who again redirected the company towards engineering, before being replaced by Carol Bartz, who had a long look at stuff and said 'well, that's screwed up. We have to pick one direction, and it will be media & content, once and for all'.

This is why Search was sold, this is why Delicious is being closed, and why Flickr and Answers remain. Delicious' only interest for Yahoo was its tagged data, useful to improve Search and possibly could be a foundation of semantic search. Without Search, there's no point. Whatever money they would collect from users is likely completely trifling and not worth the bother. They could have sold it, yes. That would have been nicer.
posted by Spanner Nic at 5:38 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


namewithoutwords: "limeonaire: "Anyone know of a stand-alone tool I could host on my own Apache server that would do the same basic things Delicious does?

I'm way late to the thread with this, but I'm running Scuttle as a self-hosted delicious replacement. It works well for bookmarking and (I just learned) even has an associated firefox plugin (which I will be installing post-haste.
"

The link for scuttle results in a 404.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 5:44 AM on December 17, 2010


Delicious Popular right now.
posted by starman at 5:59 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]




I exported my bookmarks as soon as I heard, but even though the tags are buried in the html its just a huge file of hyperlinks. Imported it to firefox ... what a nightmare. That'll teach me for fallin in love with tagging.

The link for scuttle results in a 404.

Poor page is just a victim of link rot.
posted by squeak at 6:24 AM on December 17, 2010


Busy Old Fool: You are a lifesaver. That bookmarklet seems to do what Google cannot, i.e. make it easy to import into Google Bookmarks and keep the tag data intact.

Truth be told, I think I'll store the stuff on the cloud as a backup, and start moving my info offline to a system I control.
posted by reenum at 7:30 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


By the way, though there isn't a specific Firefox add-on for Pinboard, here's an easy way to pretty much completely replicate the Delicious one's functionality:

1. Create a new bookmark (doesn't matter of what URL; you'll be replacing it). Open Firefox's bookmark manager.

2. In the browser, go here. Right-click on the word "popup" in the sentence beginning "The popup bookmarklet" under Saving Bookmarks. Select the option to "Copy Link Location."

3. Go back to the bookmark you saved, and in the Location field, paste in the JavaScript you copied in the last step.

4. Hit the little down arrow for more fields, and next to Keyword, type in something simple and easy to remember—I used "p" for Pinboard. (Single letters work fine.) You could also use, say, "d"—reminiscent of the Cmd- or Ctrl-D shortcut from the Delicious add-on. Close the bookmark manager.

5. Now you can use a simple set of tiny key commands to pull up Pinboard's Save a Bookmark dialogue. Hit Cmd- or Ctrl-L to immediately select the location bar, then type your keyword (really, in my case, a keyletter) and hit enter. Voilà! There's your Save a Bookmark dialogue.
posted by limeonaire at 8:34 AM on December 17, 2010 [4 favorites]


a javascript bookmarklet which uploads exported Delicious bookmarks to a Google Bookmarks account

THANK YOU. Works perfectly. Made it as easy as Google should have made it.

I know enough about interdepartmental bullshit at large tech companies to understand that the Chrome team and the Google Bookmarks team might not be pulling in the same direction. But why couldn't the GB team have written that bookmarklet?

Anyway, since I stopped using Delicious' social aspect a long time ago, it looks like GB will be an adequate replacement. (Although displaying web search results after bookmark search results is annoying.)
posted by Joe Beese at 8:40 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


I'm a PhD student and Delicious is one of the two websites that I absolutely, positively cannot live without for doing my research.
posted by iamkimiam at 8:42 AM on December 17, 2010 [4 favorites]


YAY! My bookmarks finally uploaded to pinthingie-whatever, and 7 hours later they are all there!

They're pretty ugly and there are no cute and helpful thumbnails, but I have helpful bookmarklets so I guess I'm $7.77 worth of happy.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:53 AM on December 17, 2010


I don't know why, but I have immense schadenfreude on threads like this for services that I never used.
posted by wcfields at 9:11 AM on December 17, 2010 [2 favorites]


Does it really not make any business sense for Yahoo to at least try to sell Delicious? Or are there really no buyers?
posted by statolith at 9:34 AM on December 17, 2010


Yahoo! is not exactly renown for its business acumen.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:37 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Glad I stopped developing with YUI a few months ago. Going to miss del.icio.us. Wondering just how they're going to screw up Flickr.

I wonder if Yahoo have even considered the damage a decision like this does to their other properties?
posted by normy at 9:44 AM on December 17, 2010


Screw that. Just this morning I search for and found a bookmark in del.icio.us that I'd put there years ago. This is a regular occurrence.

Amen. The whole "you should be happy to weed out your crap" thing is presumptuous as hell. If I want that I can go talk to my wife. And anyway she's got more of a right to tell me that.

($8.25 when I signed up a few minutes ago.)
posted by lodurr at 9:55 AM on December 17, 2010 [2 favorites]


spanner nic: ... Carol Bartz, who had a long look at stuff and said 'well, that's screwed up. We have to pick one direction, and it will be media & content, once and for all'.

This is why Search was sold, this is why Delicious is being closed, and why Flickr and Answers remain.


I'm not following the logic of this. Flickr is content but Delicious isn't? Groups aren't content?

And: It would have been difficult for you to more strenuously validate my analysis that American CEOs are paid way more than is warranted by their demonstrated reasoning or management ability. From my perspective, Bartz has just sliced off everything that they need to make Flickr a success. If they'd not had their heads up their asses, Flickr, Delicious and Buzz (which in case folks haven't noticed has great cross-net penetration as a widget, at least) could have been the foundation of a competitive social networking offering. Hell, even Yahoo Answers could have played a role.
posted by lodurr at 10:01 AM on December 17, 2010


re: why not sell the poperties, instead of closing them down?

There were similar questions asked last year when Harley-Davidson shut down their Buell brand instead of selling it. Similar reasons were given in that announcement, with similar 'wtf!?' reactions. I think everyone settled on the explaination that there were possibly some sort of favorable tax implications in shutting down a divison and/or acquired company, as opposed to selling it outright.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 10:21 AM on December 17, 2010


Ah. Yahoo! has done this to several sites that I used and liked. Acquire, neglect. Acquire, neglect. The first time they killed something I loved was the GeoCities chat capabilities. The chat had been simple, text-based, highly customizable, and users could easily incorporate the chats into their sites. Then came the re-vamp, which was basically to homogenize everything and require applets... in other words, take away everything unique and make the interface difficult or impossible to use on slower computers. It's like someone said, "how do we kill part of the culture of this site we bought? Oh, and it would be great if we could destroy a massive potential advertising network at the same time."

Eventually, I quit all Yahoo! products except mail. And then Gmail came along and allowed me to escape that, too. They haven't killed Flickr yet, but....

Think they'd sell del.icio.us to me for $1? It would be almost certainly cheaper than whatever they're doing now.
posted by zennie at 10:22 AM on December 17, 2010


This just got posted on the official blog: What's Next For Delicious?

Key quotes: "We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users." "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We’ll let you know more as things develop."
posted by blech at 10:44 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Backpedalling bullshitting bastards.
posted by ceri richard at 10:53 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


You gotta be fucking kidding.
posted by brundlefly at 10:56 AM on December 17, 2010


Busy Old Fool: "I also posted this in the AskMe thread, but it might be useful for someone here.

I haven't tested this, but it looks interesting: a javascript bookmarklet which uploads exported Delicious bookmarks to a Google Bookmarks account.
"

Sweet jesus, that worked like a charm! It all uploaded, including the tags. Thanks, BOF!
posted by Kevin Street at 10:57 AM on December 17, 2010 [2 favorites]


TRANSLATION: "We were shocked by how much money Pinboard is making, and we want us summadat."
posted by entropicamericana at 10:59 AM on December 17, 2010 [10 favorites]


>>posted on the official blog

Someone must not have liked this idea; the link now generates:

"a 410 Gone error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

I don't see how it's traffic, given yahoo's server farms...
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 11:20 AM on December 17, 2010


Looks like the admin from blog.delicious.com was part of the team that they wacked yesterday.

D'OH!
posted by jenkinsEar at 11:22 AM on December 17, 2010


>We were shocked by how much money Pinboard is making

The CEO at Yahoo makes a million dollars a week for making decisions like closing Delicious. I don't see how the 10 grand that pinboard has made is going to factor in...

The number of person hours invested in Delicous is staggering. This disregard for useful work is a very nasty aspect of capitalism.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 11:25 AM on December 17, 2010 [3 favorites]


This just got posted on the official blog: What's Next For Delicious?

Key quotes: "We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users." "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We’ll let you know more as things develop."


Yep, apparently someone didn't like that; here's the text of the post (actually, the entire blog!) now:

Yahoo! - 500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, Internal Server Error.
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@yahoo-inc.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 410 Gone error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Please check the URL for proper spelling and capitalization. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo!, try visiting the Yahoo! home page or look through a list of Yahoo!'s online services. Also, you may find what you're looking for if you try searching below.

posted by limeonaire at 11:25 AM on December 17, 2010


Here's a cached copy of the blog....that I found through, what else, Delicious.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 11:27 AM on December 17, 2010


I don't know which disgusts me more - that they canned great products that they've left to die, or the backpeddling and CYAness of the taking down of that post. Yahoo used to have such promise, but their management has done an fantastic job of screwing everything up. Chichibio, you described it well.

I hate to say it, but I'd like to see Google take it over. I'm open to anyone, but maybe that kind of data intensive application is right up Google's ally, and at least I get the sense that Google supports apps that people do truly love. I'll try a bunch of the third party apps, but having to hope for a great product to survive is getting trickier these days. Maybe they'll be ressurrected like Bloglines was with Merchant Circle. I hope someone takes Flickr away from them too - to think I paid money for that service when it'll probably be turfed too. I'm so tired of having to import and export my data out of services just because the business folks who are running them can't manage their businesses.
posted by rmm at 11:58 AM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


The CEO at Yahoo makes a million dollars a week for making decisions like closing Delicious.

Which boggles the mind. Seriously, there was a time when somebody talked to Jerry Yang about giving his whole company a million dollars to build stuff with, and he was thrilled to get the offer. Now someone gets paid a million dollars a week to kill stuff that Jerry Yang and his friends would have lost their shit over if anybody had showed it to them back then.

When are we going to get over this bizarre belief that we seem to have that CEOs are worth that kind of money?
posted by lodurr at 12:27 PM on December 17, 2010 [2 favorites]


The announcement was crossposted on the dev blog, and that's still up. Incompetence, not malice, etc.
posted by zamboni at 12:37 PM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


seen around the net: "The easiest way to shut down Wikileaks would be to have Yahoo! acquire it."
posted by caddis at 12:55 PM on December 17, 2010 [10 favorites]


The What's next for Delicious post, in full on Digiphile blog.

What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

- We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.


As I said in my Askme answer on bookmarking alternatives, if all this is based on the word "Sunset" in a silde that was never meant for public consumption, it's perfectly possible that they basically want to get shot of something that isn't working out for them, and that does not necessarily mean shutting it down. It would be insane to shut it down if you could sell it, even for a small amount.

That said, as pb said way upthread... this raises a lot of issues about cloud services and esp free cloud services. They will be there as long as they are financially viable, whether through earning revenue, pulling in donations or whatever. And if they cease to be financially viable for any reason, whether the company's own ineptitude, changing technology, changing usage patterns, they could be gone.

The list of things that have already gone is pretty long.

I joined Pinboard, but even there, I don't know if their business model can hold up long term if they get a huge userbase. i.e. Costs will be in proportion to total number of users, but revenues only to new users signing up, which works fine when you are small and growing fast, but not when you are very big and growing quite slow.

And we do really need something like this to be around for many many years.
posted by philipy at 12:57 PM on December 17, 2010 [4 favorites]


If you fire teh entire team, it's more or less dead. When was the last time you can remember that something was "sold" without any of the people who knew how to make it run, and it went on to have any importance in the marketplace whatsoever?

I've personally worked for two companies that were essentially sold as intellectual property, no humans included. (Well, not any that actually knew jack shit about the products, at least.) In both cases the new owners professed to be interested in developing the software. (Ironically, in the case where they should have been telling the truth, they were lying, and in the case where they should have just dumped it, they were telling the truth.)

When they do end up having importance, they usually suck. Case in point: Powerpoint. Or Outlook. Or any of the myriad, profoundly-mediocre offerings that Computer Associates was trying to foist off on PC users in the 90s.
posted by lodurr at 1:16 PM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


And we do really need something like this to be around for many many years.

Speaking of which, I'm finding Google Bookmarks more satisfying than I expected. Coming to it from Delicious has a Firefox-to-Chrome kind of feeling.

Still, Delicious deserved a nobler end than this. Fuck you, Yahoo!. Two times.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:42 PM on December 17, 2010


The delicious blog post is back: http://blog.delicious.com/

Pinboard is nice and I already set it up to mirror my delicious bookmarks, but I really, really prefer delicious. I will stay until the bitter end, and if they want to tell me the end is not neigh, I will happily drink their Kool-Aid and stick around as long as I can. I hope they are bought or given to someone who will love delicious, and monetise it nicely.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:43 PM on December 17, 2010 [3 favorites]


here's an easy way to pretty much completely replicate the Delicious one's functionality
That's probably true if you think the only difference between the Delicious extension and the Pinboard bookmarklet is the fact that you can bookmark with the extension without using your mouse. For me, that's not important at all. I never use the keyboard shortcut. I did dislike the fact that I needed to have the bookmarks toolbar visible for the bookmarklet, but I found a solution for that as well: you can put the bookmarks toolbar next to the File menu (Go to view->toolbars->customize and then drag Bookmarks Toolbar Items next to the Help menu). There is also a Firefox addon that allows you to make custom buttons. This extension should allow you to make real shortcuts (like ctrl-D) as well.

What I dislike most about the pinboard bookmarklet is the way tags are autocompleted. I miss the suggestions from the users that bookmarked a link before (pinboard does this, but it lacks critical mass) but it also doesn't always autocomplete my own tags. I just tried it with a tag that I have used six times and it doesn't get completed. I think it only autocompletes tags that are used the most often? I also prefer the delicious way of tag suggestions, with the drop down list.

Also, the bookmarklet is slower than the extension because it needs a pageload on a server. The extension only needs to connect to the server after I hit enter, and then I am already reading my next tab, I don't need to wait for that.
posted by davar at 1:54 PM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Give it to matthowie. Metalicious. wait! not metal-icious, meta-licious! Oh, nevermind.

I can't believe Yahoo waited an entire day to respond, after a bunch of people assumed the worst and signed up elsewhere.
posted by statolith at 1:56 PM on December 17, 2010 [5 favorites]


damn, so who can tell me whether I should open a paid Flickr account? I was about to do that, move my gallery over and all my local pics too. But now I'm not sure if it's worth investing the time to do it...
posted by exhilaration at 2:24 PM on December 17, 2010


Flickr is fine. Flickr is not on the deep six (sorry "sunset") list. Flickr gets staff, love, and funding and is not going anywhere.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:06 PM on December 17, 2010


this raises a lot of issues about cloud services and esp free cloud services. They will be there as long as they are financially viable, whether through earning revenue, pulling in donations or whatever. And if they cease to be financially viable for any reason, whether the company's own ineptitude, changing technology, changing usage patterns, they could be gone.

The likelihood of someone not being able to get their data out of a prominent cloud service before it ceases operation* is vastly less than the likelihood of their hard drive dying.

Backing up data has never been easier. If you're not doing it yet, you've got little excuse.

* While we're all sad that Delicious is going away, no one needs to lose any personal data over it.
posted by Joe Beese at 3:07 PM on December 17, 2010


Now they're saying they not closing it (?). Yahoo Says Delicious For Sale, Blames Press for Confusion. Something tells me they changed their mind since yesterday … or they have the slowest PR response team in the universe. Or they confused Delicious with another asset. They have so many — all webby kinds of things, and it gets confusing.
posted by taz at 3:45 PM on December 17, 2010 [2 favorites]


Time to call Archive Team -- again.
posted by armage at 4:01 PM on December 17, 2010


Delicious had a brilliant community. The people who used it regularly were a different class of internet user, extremely savvy, and having access to their bookmarks offered a tremendous insight into the state of the web and the state of the art in a wide array of topics

This, exactly. I'm immensely pleased that it seems like it might not be going away.

Still, fuck Yahoo.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:33 PM on December 17, 2010


being able to get their data out of a prominent cloud service

For that to be of use there has to another service out there to upload the data to, which provides the functionality you require, and a seamless upload process.

Tech migration is rarely that painless.

The Delicious to Pinboard transition was pretty smooth as these things go. But even then as people have been pointing out, they "got their data out" if all you meant by data was bookmarks, but if "the data" also meant data on social connections or tag bundles, that's too bad, because Delicious doesn't export that, and Pinboard wouldn't understand it even if it did.
posted by philipy at 5:47 PM on December 17, 2010


if "the data" also meant data on social connections or tag bundles, that's too bad, because Delicious doesn't export that, and Pinboard wouldn't understand it even if it did.

Technically, you can export your tag bundles with the API:
https://api.del.icio.us/v1/tags/bundles/all?

Retrieve all of a user's bundles.
Arguments

&bundle={NAME}

(optional) Fetch just the named bundle.

Example Response

<bundles>
<bundle name="music" tags="ipod mp3 music" />
</bundles>
What you do with it afterwards, that's a different question.
posted by zamboni at 6:19 PM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Contender for replacement for delicious zootool.com is currently down.

"We are offline -- The Delicious rumors hit us pretty hard. We are currently working on the import system and the whole infrastructure to be able to handle that better. Sorry for the downtime and thanks for your patience."
posted by vverse23 at 10:15 PM on December 17, 2010


Time to call Archive Team -- again.

We're on it.
posted by jscott at 10:58 PM on December 17, 2010 [2 favorites]




A response to that last tweet: Well dude, I gotta think that maybe if you hadn't trashed the company/product for so many years, they might be more open to the idea.

Earlier Joshua responded to someone's suggestion that he should buy it back with maybe if they paid me.
posted by davar at 3:58 AM on December 18, 2010


I'm glad that some people found the Delicious Export to Google Bookmarks Uploader bookmarklet I linked to above useful. However, my comment currently has more favourites than the author's blog entry has comments thanking him for writing the bookmarklet! It would be great if anyone who found it useful nipped over there to say 'thanks'. People who hack together useful tools and share them are one of the cornerstones of the net, after all.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 4:08 AM on December 18, 2010 [3 favorites]


The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead.
[a man puts a body on the cart]
Large Man with Dead Body: Here's one.
The Dead Collector: That'll be ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There's your ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.
The Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm not.
The Dead Collector: He isn't.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I'm getting better.
Large Man with Dead Body: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
The Dead Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I don't want to go on the cart.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, don't be such a baby.
The Dead Collector: I can't take him.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I feel fine.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, do me a favor.
The Dead Collector: I can't.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
The Dead Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, when's your next round?
The Dead Collector: Thursday.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I think I'll go for a walk.
Large Man with Dead Body: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't: I feel happy. I feel happy.
[the Dead Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the Body with his a whack of his club]
Large Man with Dead Body: Ah, thank you very much.
The Dead Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Large Man with Dead Body: Right.
posted by feelinglistless at 5:13 AM on December 18, 2010 [3 favorites]


If, as it would seem, that Yahoo canned the team, then when they say they are selling it what the really mean is selling the brand and the user base since they have, in essence, already thrown out the technology. So whoever bought it would be looking to either (1) just milk it out without doing much (quite a few companies specialize in that) or (2) taking it somewhere totally new, direction wise, or just (3) integrating it into another product and bringing in the userbase. It wouldn't be what it is now, and the change would be very unlikely to be to the benefit of the user.

The milking it scenario is unlikely as there is not a lot of lock-in or solid revenue stream; the users are likely too mobile. I'd say (3) seems the likely outcome. The barrier to entry in web is low enough that (2) could probably be done from scratch, though that critical mass of users can be very hard to build ... hmm....
posted by Bovine Love at 6:53 AM on December 18, 2010


BTW, I did my part by not only migrating my account to pinboard, but I deleted my Delicious one, giving one less user to sell.
posted by Bovine Love at 6:55 AM on December 18, 2010


A response to that last tweet: Well dude, I gotta think that maybe if you hadn't trashed the company/product for so many years, they might be more open to the idea.

That is an employee of Yahoo, though, davar.

The same guy earlier tweeted, Non-scientific poll of ~30 of my non-tech friends about who uses Delicious.com. No one. Response consisted of "WTF is that?" & "Sounds NSFW"

Which possibly gives some insight about Yahoo's general attitude toward Delicious, and web apps generally, and their place in the whole scene. They seem to want to consolidate their position as the place for the user who has never heard of delicious (and definitely not del.icio.us) or other "techy" stuff. Which makes a lot of sense, really. If they would only stop buying them.

But, as an employee of the company who was tweeting this after the news broke, he sounds like a lot more like someone justifying the closing of Delicious than someone talking about letting it free to become competitive or whatever blah-blah.
posted by taz at 7:12 AM on December 18, 2010


Jefferey Zeldman tweeted that his company (Happy Cog) is interested in buying Delicious.
posted by Mick at 7:28 AM on December 18, 2010


And Zeldman buying it would be a good thing why?

It's not worth the time of a company that pays it's CEO $1M/week to sell Delicious for less than half a million dollars, minimum. They'll be starting their ask in the $1.5B range, I'd wager. So some design shop, even the "2010 .net Magazine Design Agency of the Year", is not going to be in the consideration set.
posted by lodurr at 7:43 AM on December 18, 2010


"less than half a million dollars" >> "less than half a billion dollars". Sorry.
posted by lodurr at 7:44 AM on December 18, 2010


Yahoo product boss Blake Irving on the leaked presentation (via poorly worded tweet):

@bpm140 @joshu Really dude? Can't wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone!

You can't fire someone twice, dumbass.
posted by benzenedream at 1:13 PM on December 18, 2010 [4 favorites]


It's not worth the time of a company that pays it's CEO $1M/week to sell Delicious for less than half a million dollars, minimum. They'll be starting their ask in the $1.5B range, I'd wager. So some design shop, even the "2010 .net Magazine Design Agency of the Year", is not going to be in the consideration set.

It was never $1.5B or even $500M. The rumored purchase price was just north of $30M. And given how Yahoo has treated Delicious and the exodus of users that has followed, I find it hard to see how they can get more than $3-5M for it. Delicious was never profitable, anyway, and hasn't made Yahoo any money in the half decade since they acquired it.

Zeldman was offering to buy Delicious if it was going to be Geosite'd. And he may be the eventual winner. I can't see who else would buy it, given its declining user base.

I can't help thinking in seeing the sad state of Delicious we might be looking at what MetaFilter would look like had mathowie sold the site in the mid-2000s. It's a brand that's bigger than the product offered that generates a decent amount of revenue but will never get much above that because of its niche status and very vocal user base.
posted by dw at 2:02 PM on December 19, 2010


You're saying that because they got it for about $30M, they'd want to sell it for that? [shrug /] Maybe, but it ain't a used car, it's a product. In their mind it's done nothing but appreciate since then.

I don't think that's how they'll think about it. If Yahoo's being driven internally by the interplay between various species of bean-counter (and that seems to me to be what this episode tells us), then it behooves us to try to think about this like bean-counters. And I think bean-counters are going to tally up the cost of closing the deal against what they make on it, and in the mind of a bean-counter this deal would probably cost more than $30M to close.

Also, from your link, it's striking how well Schachter had imbibed the koolaid:
"They really get this social software stuff; they're No. 1 in that," he says. "They've done a largely competent job of absorbing other companies and products without ruining them. Flickr still stands--it's huge, and they continue to put resources into it. They understood my vision, and they didn't argue with it. They led with 'We want you to come here and tell us where to go.'"
posted by lodurr at 4:28 PM on December 19, 2010


... as for who'd want it with its "declining user base":
  1. Metafilter is not a representative sample of its user base (and for that matter, neither is the set of People We Know or People We Follow) -- what looks like technomageddon to us could be a blip in usage by real-world people.
  2. What matters from the perspective of a product strategist at Google or MS is a combination of how many registered users they have (which has not decreased unless people have started actively deleting their own accounts) and how many links are in the system: To pages, between people, and amongst bookmarks.
Up to around $300M-$500M, I think acquiring Delicious in its current state is kind of a no-brainer for either MS or Google. Maybe a little less for MS, but Google could buy the users and the value-added in the form of tags and merge it into Google Bookmarks, and integrate it into their search.
posted by lodurr at 4:35 PM on December 19, 2010




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