What’s Next for Delicious?

http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-delicious.html

by adambyrtek • 16 years ago

220 96 16 years ago

blog.delicious.com

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

Is this too little, too late? Why wasn't this blog post made yesterday? Now "Delicious is closing" has pretty much become "truth," even with this damage control. Many have already started trying out alternate services.

Kinda scary how fast this happens...

citricsquid2• 16 years ago

Alternatively, too much too early. Everyone was so quick to jump on the idea it was shutting down with nothing more than a hint that it wasn't going to be with Yahoo! any more.

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Yahoo! shouldn't have confirmed that something is happening with Delicious so early?

I'd disagree. As soon as the story hit TechCrunch, they should have said something. Better to know one way or the other than to leave everyone speculate... because they'll assume the worst, as we've just seen.

ig1• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure they were planning to shut it down.

Because when you plan to sell part of a company, do you know what you don't do ? - you don't fire all the software engineers that run it.

Do you want to guess what Yahoo did ?

It smells very much like Yahoo came up with this selling idea in the last 24 hours.

abraham3• 16 years ago

It is possible that Delicious was going to be shut down until backlash surfaced and now Y! changing its mind.

rgrove• 16 years ago

That's not the case. Internally, this intent was communicated shortly after the original announcement that leaked. It was just communicated to a smaller group of people, so it apparently didn't leak like the first announcement did.

theklub• 16 years ago

I blame techcrunch

jaybol• 16 years ago

Blame it on the a a a a a alcohol

revorad• 16 years ago

That's not fair. HN played a big part too.

alexophile• 16 years ago

Tomorrow's headline: "Did TechCrunch Just Kill Delicious?"

batasrki3• 16 years ago

Well, I think the speed was precipitated by the fact that Yahoo had already shut down a legendary property, Geocities. It's easier to believe that they'll do that again with another piece of their tech than it is that they'll do the right thing and either support it or sell it off.

orblivion3• 16 years ago

Yeah but nobody really cared about Geocities other than for the novelty, right?

varworld2• 16 years ago

Original Text (since blog was down):

What’s Next for Delicious?

Many of you have read the news stories about Delicious that began appearing yesterday. We’re genuinely sorry to have these stories appear with so little context for our loyal users. While we can’t answer each of your questions individually, we wanted to address what we can at this stage and we promise to keep you posted as future plans get finalized.

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

- No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

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.

What if I want to get my bookmarks out of Delicious right away?

- As noted above, there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it. That said, we have export options if you so choose. Additionally, many services provide the ability to import Delicious links and tags. 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.

bjonathan2• 16 years ago

or Bing cache: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fblog.delicious...

jdp23• 16 years ago

> Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press.

Speaking as a user, I am very disappointed not to see the team taking more responsibility for the way Yahoo! is handling this.

bpm140• 16 years ago

That's because "the team" was laid off on Tuesday.

dekz• 16 years ago

Sweet, if someone buys it up I may not be forced to use Yahoo ID.

pointillistic• 16 years ago

What about Flickr? I wish someone gets them in the package deal. Only then you can retire your ID. Besides I believe both services run a separate from Yahoo login.

bjonathan2• 16 years ago

This blog post claim to be destinate at the users of Delicious but it screams all over it "IF YOU HAVE MONEY AND WANT TO BUY US, PLEASE REACH US BY MAIL". Sad.

Hope, they sell it to Joshu or somebody who really cares

borism2• 16 years ago

But will "someone who really cares" pay what they want?

naner• 16 years ago

I wouldn't mind if they sold it to Google. Google wants to be more "social" and their own Google Bookmarks kind of sucks and has been neglected worse than Delicious.

Macha2• 16 years ago

If Google won't run their integrated service, why would they care for Delicious?

Or at least that's what I was thinking before the example of Google Videos and YouTube came to me.

yarone• 16 years ago

Google Chrome has a nice bookmark (and also preference) syncing feature.

wyclif5• 16 years ago

I wish they would sell it back to @joshu.

adambyrtek• 16 years ago

What's so "social" about Delicious? This is a serious question.

You can subscribe to bookmarks from other people (only if you already know their logins) and you can send bookmarks to others (using a weird for:nick meta-tag). Both features seem a bit sketchy by today's standards. This was definitely a breakthrough when Delicious was launched, but nowadays people expect more from a social site.

Not that I care about social features. I didn't miss them in Delicious, and I don't miss them in Pinboard. But it just doesn't sound convincing to brand Delicious as a great social product for Google to acquire.

varworld2• 16 years ago

"While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive."

I don't get how notepad, address book, calendar etc are part of yahoo's strategy and bookmarks aren't.

CrLf• 16 years ago

Yahoo has a strategy?

jkaufman• 16 years ago

Their Strategy Department is found to the right of the Office of Public Relations which is down the hall from their Search Engine HQ and their Research Lab for Unicorn Care.

frb• 16 years ago

Maybe these are the next things they're killing.

We should remember that "Yahoo is a content company". http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-is-focused-were-a-conte...

michaelbuckbee• 16 years ago

That quote strikes me as incredibly tone deaf. Not just the corporate speak of 'resourced' after laying off the team, but the utter lack of vision they have for the product. Delicious defined a category of webservices (public bookmarking) but to their eyes they aren't 'competitive'.

dasil003• 16 years ago

Yeah it's really terrible. The part about "we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo" is laughable. I understand they can't just be honest and say "we don't know how to use it", but the way they phrased it conveys a sort of hubris that a company as poorly run as Yahoo should stay far far away from.

Isofarro3• 16 years ago

Notepad, Address Book and Calendar are already tightly integrated into My Yahoo, which is what the current Yahoo homepage was originally derived from. Delicious was always an outsider in comparison.

Because of that tight integration, I guess those features are tended to be used by certain coveted audiences of the My Yahoo product - like people monitoring their stock portfolios using My Yahoo. So there's enough of an ad-happy audience using those features to make componentising these features - perhaps as YAP modules - throughout the range of Yahoo sites.

Though, as I understood it, Yahoo notepad hasn't had any tender loving care for years (it was something I was interested in redeveloping during my time at Yahoo). It's not much more than a persistent textarea (unlike the defunct Google notebook that had far richer structure)

mcfunley• 16 years ago

Putting the entire team of people that knew how to operate it out on the street was perhaps not the best strategy for getting a good price.

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

Nor was it a particularly clueful way to pre-empt the rumor that "Delicious is shutting down".

andreyf• 16 years ago

Was it the original team that got acquired?

wyclif5• 16 years ago

No, it was this team: http://www.petefreitag.com/images/blog/delicious_office.jpg

MikeCapone• 16 years ago

"Sorry, Internal Server Error."

Sadly, that's probably what's next for Delicious.

rufo• 16 years ago

Yes, I thought this was a (somewhat cruel) joke as well when I got the error…

marcamillion• 16 years ago

This is what I saw when I went to this link:

Sorry, Internal Server Error.

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

I thought that was pretty clever by the OP. I assumed that he made up the url 'what's next for delicious' ensuring that it would go to an error page. But then I realized that it really was an error and the blog post had been taken down :(

ddrager• 16 years ago

Yahoo has been lacking any major "must have" products in the past what, 10 years?

Here is a list of everything they offer: http://everything.yahoo.com/

Delicious was about the only thing that the 'tech' crowd uses. Think about the people you know who might use Yahoo! Mail or Answers. It is the decidedly less-tech people who use these products, mainly as a throwback to the Yahoo! of 2000. Of course, Yahoo!'s goal isn't to cater to tech people, but people who click on ads. I imagine their revenue is declining for even those main-stream products, but for them to cut out the more tech oriented services which actually have a chance in the future to really get 'big', is just delaying their demise a year or 2.

delano2• 16 years ago

Yahoo has been lacking any major "must have" products in the past what, 10 years?

That's not quite true. They have a pretty good fantasy hockey pool.

commandar• 16 years ago

Flickr?

AtTheLast• 16 years ago

I agree, Yahoo! Fantasy Sports are pretty solid.

zoomzoom3• 16 years ago

Google has a big opportunity here. Delicious is one of the best social search products out there. Any real google innovation in social would be boosted by the user data and brand. Not to mention the pr boost from saving them. Much as many on HN and elsewhere are suggesting the viability of alternatives, few of them seem to compare in terms of data and function right now. Not that this couldn't change quickly.

batasrki3• 16 years ago

Totally agree that Google should snap it up. If any company needs it, it's Google and passing this opportunity by would be a mistake on their part. Not to mention that Delicious could be sold at a lower price since they've announced that they've been put out and are looking for a company to buy them.

Isofarro3• 16 years ago

No! We are seeing time and time again that big companies acquiring sites that are not directly relevant to their core businesses leave those acquisitions floundering. Google has the same problems of acquisitions that have just disappeared.

If delicious is to survive and flourish, then the organisation that should run delicious should be an organisation that solely concentrates on running delicious. Perhaps spinning it off as a separate business entity is the right way.

Delicious has stagnated for far too long as it is. So either spin it out into an independent business entity with fresh ideas and initiative, or replace it with a federated platform to allow others to innovate on top of it.

gojomo• 16 years ago

If Yahoo had just put 'Spinout/Sunset' atop that slide naming Del.icio.us, rather than just 'Sunset', a lot of the anguish could have been avoided.

pronoiac• 16 years ago

It's up on the dev blog:

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/12/whats-nex...

paul• 16 years ago

I want to make fun of the word "resourced", but can't decide how. Something about lame corporate speak.

Now I'm off to resource the dog...

mambodog• 16 years ago

Well I felt that way about 'evidenced', but that's pretty widely used now, so look forward to resourcing your dog for years to come.

plusbryan• 16 years ago

If I were in negotiations with Yahoo to buy one of their properties (and I were more nefarious), I'd have leaked a story like this to reduce the sales price.

raphman• 16 years ago

Just in case: http://savedelicious.pommepause.com/ (collaborative crawling of Delicious using a Chrome extension)

dgrant• 16 years ago

Anyone know a good alternative to Delicious?

fosk• 16 years ago

http://1r7.net/

wyclif5• 16 years ago

http://www.pinboard.in/

eapen• 16 years ago

diigo.com been using it for a couple of years now.

jleader• 16 years ago

Note that they've pulled down all the other delicious blog posts; the source for this page still has a "previous" link in the source to 'http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/tags-return-to-the-bo..., but it's gone, as are the rss and atom feeds, etc.

drgath• 16 years ago

The static page was put up to handle the massive load hitting the blog.

javadi82• 16 years ago

I find it very odd that Delicious was not a "strategic fit" at Yahoo!

If I remember right, Yahoo was a bunch of links pointing people to webpages. How is that different from bookmarks?

Citation regarding the history of Yahoo:

Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations.

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html

random42• 16 years ago

Why would they do a press release, before selling it? I dont remember anyone ever putting a "For Sale" board, for a software property of Delicious' scale.

It is just they are covering up for the bad press, IMO.

itsnotvalid• 16 years ago

http://blog.delicious.com/

The blog has since only hosted two single web pages (http://blog.delicious.com/index.htm and http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-delici...)

I was already not very impressed that they were bought by yahoo years ago, as I thought that yahoo! is not the right place to host (I used http://del.icio.us, with the dots, since 2005). I was and am also a pro user of http://flickr.com and wonder if my huge collection there would be wiped clean in 2011.

Panic spreading.

Just a side note, I hate the "from yahoo!" part of the logo (on both sites). Well, they should have done that much earlier, and I hope that some companies with big muscles could save them. I really don't want to switch boat.