Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Deepti — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:44:09 -0000

Delicicous Rock! The new one is good as well

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Guest — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:08:44 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Mike — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:48:24 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

app — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:31:02 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Les Orchard — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:23:05 -0000

Joshua also commented a little further up the page there, and it wasn't to complain about the veracity of the article.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

soarisawesome — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:39:42 -0000

The popular section is full of useless shit.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Manuel — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:11:36 -0000

I think the slow growth is a good thing - delicious is the only social bookmark site that is not full of spam.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Busted Keys — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:46:54 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

bustedkeys — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:46:14 -0000

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

bustedkeys — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:36:05 -0000

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

spinchange — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:22:34 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

johnebbert — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:12:24 -0000

wikipedia says, "various guesses suggest it was sold for somewhere between US$15 million and US$30 million"

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Rick — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:10:32 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Josiah — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:34:43 -0000

I still live by http://delicious.com/popular/

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!)

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Drink of the Week — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:29:51 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Drink of the Week — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:21:47 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

joshua schachter — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:15:13 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Alok Rai — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:56:26 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Rod Hagwood — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:14:01 -0000

I agree with Bonk: the article is interesting, but poorly constructed.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Scott Beamer — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:42:51 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Scott Beamer — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:41:18 -0000

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).

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Shevonne — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:33:39 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

jenify7 — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:10:15 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

florb — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:08:30 -0000

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.

Re: Delicious Founder: I Wish I Had Not Sold to Yahoo

Meredith Treinen — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:03:38 -0000

Well. Lesson learned I suppose, but heartbreaking for sure.