I used to use Delicious a lot (my account still has my 1000+ links I'd saved). It was handy to have, and I never used Firefox's built-in bookmarking tools, except for on the toolbar. Unfortunately/Fortunately, Twitter has changed the way I handle links. The links I saved to delicious were largely for sharing purposes. With Twitter, I can share more links, in less time, to more people. It's as simple as that.
However, Twitter fails miserably in one area, and that's archiving. With only 140 characters for descriptions or tagging, links I've shared in the past are often lost on me, looking back at them, making them unsearchable. They get lost in information overload--fun for the moment, gone in an instant. To date, as well, there's no good way to pull links I've posted from Twitter and save them in my Delicious bookmarks.
On Ask MetaFilter, I was directed to Tweecious, and I'd already seen Twitticious; both had severe issues, when I tried them, and I ultimately gave up. I wanted to use TwitchBoard to port the links I posted on Twitter over to Delicious, but it's in limited beta and hasn't accepted new users in a long while, as far as I know.
Delicious was invaluable to me in the height of its development (it's also valuable to more users now than ever before), and it certainly still could be valuable for the reasons I've mentioned. Unfortunately, one can really tell that Yahoo!'s heart is not in it, or at the very least they're uncertain with which business moves would be most valuable to make at present. There have been Delicious FF add-on bugs that have gone unfixed, and the site's development is stagnant. That being said, as much of a taboo as it may be for Joshua Schachter to make the statements he's made, I seem to recall Delicious' development being slow(er) and buggier before its Yahoo! takeover, and many of the best features to the site have only come after the purchase, so I don't think anyone should come to the conclusion that the little guy always does/knows best from this.
I'm hoping someone will eventually create a good and reliable way for my Twitter links to be archived. Maybe it will be Delicious, and maybe it won't. Twitter itself would be smart to build some better, more organized archiving.
Mike Chelen
· 3 months ago
Using Twitter would be alright since I can usually remember a word or two to find a link, except that currently anything older than a few weeks doesn't appear in search.
leliathomas
· 3 months ago
You can actually use Google to get to old statuses. Just do a search like twitter YOURUSERNAME status KEYWORD. It almost always works...but then again the key is to remember what you wrote with stuff.
Bonk
· 3 months ago
Wow, this is a poorly written article.
leliathomas
· 3 months ago
Wow, this is a nonconstructive comment.
Gerard
· 3 months ago
The gall. Seriously.
"Thus did Schachter come to believe that the deal was what was best for Del.icio.us. And it's pretty good for him too. If reports of a price north of $30 million are accurate, the acquisition puts his net worth (on paper) at more than $15 million." ( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/busine... )
Yahoo sets this little brat up for life and he has the audacity to talk about them as a "sausage factory?" Frankly, I think Yahoo has done a good job with Delicious BECAUSE they have tinkered with it so little. And what they HAVE done with the UI is a vast improvement. Remember all the worry when Yahoo bought Flickr? Most Flickr users say it's far better and more stable than ever. I just have problems with his taking the kind of money from this company like he did and then turn around in 4 years and bitch and moan and say he wished he hadn't sold. Does *anybody* here REALLY believe that? Put him back in his old apartment surviving on Mac 'n Cheese without the luxury home, trips, cars, gifts to family, etc. and see how badly he wished he would never have sold.
Shame, Josh Schachter, shame.
- Gerard
Tim
· 3 months ago
Amen.
And nobody criticizes Schachter for being totally unable to push his agenda forward inside Yahoo. Clearly Yahoo bought the property hoping his vision would take it forward. He cashed out, sat on the sidelines, and then cries about the lack of development.
Gerald
· 3 months ago
You are 100 percent on the money there. This guy should have been stronger and push his agenda if he felt this way. He was probably too busy spending the cash that Yahoo gave him. For god sake its a bookmarking tool, what else does it need. This guy just has an inflated ego.
joshua schachter
· 3 months ago
Yes, my vision was very important. But they stripped me of all employees and responsibility, and put them under someone who didn't care very much.
The product didn't become what it could have been. It did not get to be as big as it could have.
Like I said. I regret the decision.
florb
· 3 months ago
you guys have no idea what you're talking about. . . go through an acquisition at yahoo yourselves and you'll understand joshua's statements completely.
Jonas Halpren
· 3 months ago
the easy option was not to sell at the time. if you thought you were going to keep control, then you got bad advice. Yahoo was a mess in 2005. I wasn't there, but a little due diligence goes a long way. Of course, the good news is that you got paid. My guess it that you feel you would have made more had you not sold then. Unfortunately, there are risks in everything. You took the money in exchange for control. Deal with it.
Houbi
· 3 months ago
I'm gonna save this article in my delicious bookmarks. Can probably be re-used in 3 to 4 years, with a small change/replace of delicious to friendfeed - yahoo to facebook.
Hirvesh
· 3 months ago
Yeah, I think delicious is really going down. I especially do not like the new frontpage, which lists fresh bookmarks as default, it sucks and popular bookmarks do not really get that much exposure now and less traffic for websites who made the effort to write a popular post.
Sam
· 3 months ago
I actually like it ... catches some new and relevant articles for me like Google's new search sandbox. The Popular tab [is still available] just shows SEO, Photoshop, and Chinese links.
soarisawesome
· 3 months ago
The popular section is full of useless shit.
BradleyWill
· 3 months ago
How much did they sell for? And what kind of new features did they plan on adding?
johnebbert
· 3 months ago
wikipedia says, "various guesses suggest it was sold for somewhere between US$15 million and US$30 million"
Frank Cseh
· 3 months ago
Delicous is still the greatest and most popular for social bookmarking. Nothing is wrong there. Some additional search queries would be handy.
@fcseh - on twitter
angrykeyboarder
· 3 months ago
I like Diigo better. It's got features Delicious could really use (caching of links for one). I was a big Delicious fan for a long time (I still use it) but Diigo is better.
عالم قطر
· 3 months ago
i think yahoo can handle it as well and if they involve him as worker in D it's better
I still check it at least once a day--I think it's great even with the recent changes.
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raam
· 3 months ago
Is this a case of a founder not cutting the umbilical cord?
Lamenting what could have been....
brian fanslau
· 3 months ago
I believe so. But it is still a sad truth. Delicious is still very useful and I use it nearly everyday, but with any popular product there is only so far one persona can go and I'm sure at the time in 2005 he could not have known Yahoo would become the slug behind Google and MSN it is today.
Michael Netsch
· 3 months ago
Is there a plugin that you use so that you have the bookmarking option to whatever service gets reviewed in the article?
Markoting
· 3 months ago
Who can recommend me another social bookmarking if they say delicious is not that relevant anymore? I dunno any other. Twitter lose the links, Facebook doesn't archive them either. Delicious is still the best socialbookmarking for me and I love my deliciou's firefox toolbar.
How about StumbleUpon? It's not just for discovering links. With their toolbar in Firefox, there is no need to bookmark it in your browser AND add it to the service, it does both in a single shot when you add it to the service, tagged too. If ever comes a day where StumbleUpon ceases to exist, you'll still have every last bookmark archived in your browser's bookmarks. And it's all automatic. You'd lose a lot less than with any of the other services out there. All the rest of the services depend on you remembering to export your collection on a regular basis to back them up yourself, and some don't even give you that option.
Tinh
· 3 months ago
It is too late Delicious. It can be affected by the BingaHoo deal?
I like delicious as the unique and ultimate social bookmarking tool but I have to say I agree. A refresh wouldn't harm anyone. Right the opposite, though.
Matthew Lowery
· 3 months ago
I feel for him soo much...
Terri
· 3 months ago
I start my day poking through the Delicious popular page, but post my own to Diigo. Their Hot Bookmarks page slants a bit to education links (not uninteresting), while I want tech news. But their interface and features have had delicious beat for awhile.
Nalin Perera
· 3 months ago
Even if he didn't sell delicious, social bookmarking alone wouldn't go too far with the convergence of realtime search and social networking
Peter Clark
· 3 months ago
I think you should have asked Joshua before publishing this. He didn't want (or expect) everyone to run with the *SINGLE COMMENT*.
Kevin Gadd
· 3 months ago
But Peter, if they actually went to the trouble of verifying facts and consulting with sources before publishing a story, they wouldn't be able to compete with modern news sources like TechCrunch!
I bet they didn't even bother to make sure that the 'joshua' on HN was actually the real deal. For all they know it could have been a fake account posting stuff to make him look bad. It's not as if it's hard to impersonate someone on a site like HN.
rickg
· 3 months ago
So, um, the web is public. You know this, right? If Shachter doesn't want to have a comment seen or commented on, don't make it on Hacker News. Once he does, no one has to ask his permission to talk about what he's said.
lmorchard
· 3 months ago
Joshua also commented a little further up the page there, and it wasn't to complain about the veracity of the article.
donna winton
· 3 months ago
I really like delicious as a totaly portable bookmarking agent. it archives everything I want to save, with tags and comments, accessible 24/7 worldwide from anybody's computer using any platform. that's brilliant. I don't use it to share bookmarks with friends so much, but I have found a lot of good sites from friends' bookmarks. for what it is, I think it's great. for what it maybe should be, would love to see better connectivity and more apps written for it. sure why not?
Markus Merz
· 3 months ago
Same for Flickr. Seeing the stagnation in the former best bookmarking service of the world really is heartbreaking. Well, time are changing. I still love my delicious (read d.i.u) account but my new favorite for bookmarks is Zotero.
Zotero has group collaboration, group roles, tags, notes, metadata, local database, synched database, structured RSS, fullscreen mode, folders and a lot more.
Sorry Yahoo. Bad. Delicious could have been Zotero easily.
Now I am waiting for a Flickr designed by photo professionals. Rights management and stuff...
Kivi Miller
· 3 months ago
I use delicious every day, but am sorely disappointed that it hasn't kept up with integration with other social media. Why on earth can't you publish articles with one particular tag to your blog? You have to publish everything or nothing, which is just ridiculous. And it's been that way for years now. If they would add this one feature, and make it customizeable, so I could pick whether to publish my description too for example, I would use it even more than I do now.
Donagh Mc Sweeney
· 3 months ago
Social bookmarking is more secondary in the world of social media at the moment and I can't really see this changing.
Elizabeth K. Barone
· 3 months ago
It drives me crazy when people sell their babies and then complain when it all goes downhill. If you wanted to have control over it all and help it grow to be a successful company, you shouldn't have sold. Plain and simple.
We all want to be the next big thing and make money off of our ideas, but there are other ways to monetize. Look at Google. They're a homegrown project that started off small just like Delicious, but they never sold to a bigger company. They found a way to take their ideas and make money off of them, while still having control of their original foundations.
We can't have it all. It's either do or sell, but don't publicly complain and criticize the other company when you realize you made a mistake. It's very classless.
Gerald
· 3 months ago
bullshit. He got a lot of cash for a very simple product. he should take his cash and invest it in a new venture rather than complaining. if he didnt sell it to yahoo im sure it would have died on the vine years ago.
BooHoo
· 3 months ago
Boo Hoo. If he wants it so badly, he should make Yahoo an offer to buy it back. Or start something else. Yeesh.
Sid
· 3 months ago
"What he got in return wasn’t the same commitment." Sorry, but what he got in return was money. Hence the term "sold".
It's really too late to start crying about it now. When you sell your baby, you need to walk away and not look back.
Michael Titus
· 3 months ago
This looks like a train wreck breakup between Joshua and Yahoo. One lover blames the other for all his/her ills.
Meredith Treinen
· 3 months ago
Well. Lesson learned I suppose, but heartbreaking for sure.
jenify7
· 3 months ago
i am just a normal user, but i agree with this article. I had a look at Delicious.com and I found it's complicated. That's why i don't use it. But if it changed, i would try.
dcfemella
· 3 months ago
Delicious has to compete with social media sites (SocialMedian, Blerp, Digg, etc.) that allow users the ability of saving information (and sites) that they can also share with their followers and other sites (i.e. Twitter and Facebook). I can see why he is frustrated. However, I am assuming he made a great profit from this, so he should probably create another product with how he envisioned Delicious would have evolved into.
angrykeyboarder
· 3 months ago
What I don't understand is why Yahoo! bought Delicious to begin with. They already had Yahoo! MyWeb (a competing service) and they have yet to merge the two. So in essense they are competing with themselves (unless Yahoo! is shutting MyWeb down like they have other services recently).
Rod Hagwood
· 3 months ago
I agree with Bonk: the article is interesting, but poorly constructed.
alochrye
· 3 months ago
In spite of being a pioneer in bookmarking web apps del.ici.ous has somehow lost its steam. It has stagnated. I still use it for my bookmarking but look forward to the day that Mozilla Weave matures completely. That way I will have access to all my bookmarks all the time from any device that has Firefox installed. Del.icio.us might become totally redundant then. Probably, Delicious needs to find a way to integrate better with search engines. If people's twitter statuses are being considered valuable enough to be featured in real time results by Google and others, why should bookmarks not be considered important? Delicious needs to make itself attractive and easy to use for more and more people to use it. It's all about the adoption.
Jonas Halpren
· 3 months ago
Hard to feel sorry for Joshua. Hindsight is 20/20. Everyone knows one you sell (whatever the product) it is no longer yours. Does he have a right to be upset, yes. However, he had to know that one he took the money, he no longer had control. It is a problem many wish they had.
Check it and extract good stuff from it almost every day.
I could care less about the front page. What I care about is WHO is using delicious as it's the social element that makes it special (that and I don't need to manage local bookmarks, yay!)
Rick
· 3 months ago
Yahoo did a complete rewrite of Delicious. Since Yahoo employs some of the smartest devs in the business, they're know damn well a rewrite is a last resort, when the existing code is such utter and complete crap even the slightest change will make it fall apart. So maybe the founder is partly responsible for the fact that Yahoo couldn't do very much with Delicious.
spinchange
· 3 months ago
I admire Joshua a ton, but he always comes off as being a little bit too bitchy about his former baby.
It's sort of Alan Moore-ish in a way: Sell out, then bitch about the new owners, let everyone know how much they are screwing it up, and how you'd do it way better...if only you hadn't sold.
In the big scheme of things, maybe he shouldn't have sold...although I think 15M would help me get over most of my reservations ;)
I'd like to see him do something else. Super bright programmer.
bustedkeys
· 3 months ago
wow. what strikes me most about the Delicious "social parking" status is that founder Joshua Schachter stated the 'cash and freedom do not even come close" in context of his selling of the company to Yahoo! this shows me he is a person who has a conscience about releasing his "baby" in exchange for something that he now realizes has less value to him. it also shows he wants to create change and move in the direction of progress.
bustedkeys
· 3 months ago
wow. what strikes me most about the Delicious "social parking" status is that founder Joshua Schachter stated the 'cash and freedom do not even come close" in context of his selling of the company to Yahoo! this shows me he is a person who has a conscience about releasing his "baby" in exchange for something that he now realizes has less value to him. it also shows he wants to create change and move in the direction of progress.
Busted Keys
· 3 months ago
wow. what strikes me most about the Delicious "social parking" status is that founder Joshua Schachter stated the 'cash and freedom do not even come close" in context of his selling of the company to Yahoo! this shows me he is a person who has a conscience about releasing his "baby" in exchange for something that he now realizes has less value to him. it also shows he wants to create change and move in the direction of progress.
Manuel
· 3 months ago
I think the slow growth is a good thing - delicious is the only social bookmark site that is not full of spam.
All Comments
However, Twitter fails miserably in one area, and that's archiving. With only 140 characters for descriptions or tagging, links I've shared in the past are often lost on me, looking back at them, making them unsearchable. They get lost in information overload--fun for the moment, gone in an instant. To date, as well, there's no good way to pull links I've posted from Twitter and save them in my Delicious bookmarks.
On Ask MetaFilter, I was directed to Tweecious, and I'd already seen Twitticious; both had severe issues, when I tried them, and I ultimately gave up. I wanted to use TwitchBoard to port the links I posted on Twitter over to Delicious, but it's in limited beta and hasn't accepted new users in a long while, as far as I know.
Delicious was invaluable to me in the height of its development (it's also valuable to more users now than ever before), and it certainly still could be valuable for the reasons I've mentioned. Unfortunately, one can really tell that Yahoo!'s heart is not in it, or at the very least they're uncertain with which business moves would be most valuable to make at present. There have been Delicious FF add-on bugs that have gone unfixed, and the site's development is stagnant. That being said, as much of a taboo as it may be for Joshua Schachter to make the statements he's made, I seem to recall Delicious' development being slow(er) and buggier before its Yahoo! takeover, and many of the best features to the site have only come after the purchase, so I don't think anyone should come to the conclusion that the little guy always does/knows best from this.
I'm hoping someone will eventually create a good and reliable way for my Twitter links to be archived. Maybe it will be Delicious, and maybe it won't. Twitter itself would be smart to build some better, more organized archiving.
"Thus did Schachter come to believe that the deal was what was best for Del.icio.us. And it's pretty good for him too. If reports of a price north of $30 million are accurate, the acquisition puts his net worth (on paper) at more than $15 million."
( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/busine... )
Yahoo sets this little brat up for life and he has the audacity to talk about them as a "sausage factory?" Frankly, I think Yahoo has done a good job with Delicious BECAUSE they have tinkered with it so little. And what they HAVE done with the UI is a vast improvement. Remember all the worry when Yahoo bought Flickr? Most Flickr users say it's far better and more stable than ever. I just have problems with his taking the kind of money from this company like he did and then turn around in 4 years and bitch and moan and say he wished he hadn't sold. Does *anybody* here REALLY believe that? Put him back in his old apartment surviving on Mac 'n Cheese without the luxury home, trips, cars, gifts to family, etc. and see how badly he wished he would never have sold.
Shame, Josh Schachter, shame.
- Gerard
And nobody criticizes Schachter for being totally unable to push his agenda forward inside Yahoo. Clearly Yahoo bought the property hoping his vision would take it forward. He cashed out, sat on the sidelines, and then cries about the lack of development.
For god sake its a bookmarking tool, what else does it need.
This guy just has an inflated ego.
The product didn't become what it could have been. It did not get to be as big as it could have.
Like I said. I regret the decision.
@fcseh - on twitter
Lamenting what could have been....
diigo allows you to push your links through to delicious and it has a nice highlight/citation function, too
A Guide to Delicious Social Bookmarking http://thesocialmediaguide.com.au/2009/06/06/a-...
I bet they didn't even bother to make sure that the 'joshua' on HN was actually the real deal. For all they know it could have been a fake account posting stuff to make him look bad. It's not as if it's hard to impersonate someone on a site like HN.
Zotero has group collaboration, group roles, tags, notes, metadata, local database, synched database, structured RSS, fullscreen mode, folders and a lot more.
Group example: http://www.zotero.org/groups/markus_merz/items
This way I have a simple workaround to keep my bookmarks private except when I copy them to the public group.
Sorry Yahoo. Bad. Delicious could have been Zotero easily.
Now I am waiting for a Flickr designed by photo professionals. Rights management and stuff...
We all want to be the next big thing and make money off of our ideas, but there are other ways to monetize. Look at Google. They're a homegrown project that started off small just like Delicious, but they never sold to a bigger company. They found a way to take their ideas and make money off of them, while still having control of their original foundations.
We can't have it all. It's either do or sell, but don't publicly complain and criticize the other company when you realize you made a mistake. It's very classless.
It's really too late to start crying about it now. When you sell your baby, you need to walk away and not look back.
Probably, Delicious needs to find a way to integrate better with search engines. If people's twitter statuses are being considered valuable enough to be featured in real time results by Google and others, why should bookmarks not be considered important? Delicious needs to make itself attractive and easy to use for more and more people to use it. It's all about the adoption.
Check it and extract good stuff from it almost every day.
I could care less about the front page. What I care about is WHO is using delicious as it's the social element that makes it special (that and I don't need to manage local bookmarks, yay!)
It's sort of Alan Moore-ish in a way: Sell out, then bitch about the new owners, let everyone know how much they are screwing it up, and how you'd do it way better...if only you hadn't sold.
In the big scheme of things, maybe he shouldn't have sold...although I think 15M would help me get over most of my reservations ;)
I'd like to see him do something else. Super bright programmer.