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Yahoo has been going through troubled times and it looks like they are trying to drop some dead weight, including MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz, and (GASP!) Delicious – surely the pre-eminent social bookmarking service. I have been an advocate of social bookmarking long before ‘social’ became a Web 2.0 buzzword, using it to quickly identfy trends (picking out the signal from the noise) and as an effective search and reference for the many thousands of web pages I’ve deemed to be of interest. Twitter doesn’t come close to delivering the same sort of functionality, e.g. it has no real tagging system and no particular value as a research archive.
Fortunately, I learnt my lesson about relying on such services long ago, when I lost all my bookmarks with the Magnolia server crash (http://gnolia.com/) and have since been replicating all my bookmarks at Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) – a pretty good service if anyone is looking for an alternative to Delicious. However, I’ll continue to hope that Delicious is not allowed to sink, and that some entrepeneur out there will recognise it for the value it provides to any serious users of the social web.Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com
Social bookmarking service Delicious announced five years ago last Thursday that it had been acquired by Yahoo The first comment posted on the blog entry announcing the deal was from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, saying “Congratulations! Yahoo sure does get tagging I see.” When I heard the news, I felt very differently. I was deeply saddened that it wasn’t US Library of Congress to acquire Delicious. Five years later, Yahoo announced internally today that it is closing down Delicious. No date has been given for its closure.
It’s a loss not just for the many people who used Delicious to archive links of interest to them around the web, it’s a loss for the future – for what could have been. Five years later, people are just beginning to appreciate the value of passively published user activity data made available for analysis, personalization and more. That could have been you, Delicious.
Update: 24 hours later, Yahoo! has issued a statement saying they would like to sell, not close, Delicious.
