So the news is that del.icio.us, er, I mean “Delicious” is all set to be jettisoned by Yahoo! I’m a bit saddened by the news because I’ve been a user and fan of delicious since the early days… my oldest bookmark goes back to December of 2003… that’s 7 years worth of bookmarks.
I’ve written a lot about delicious over the years, but even through all of my posts, I was always prepared for the day it would go away, the day it would disappear, the day it would die. Last week it looked like that day had come.
I’m not concerned about my data, as it lives on elsewhere… See Scuttle rides again for info on that. My main concern was losing what many considered the whole point of del.icio.us… the network.
del.icio.us was the first big success in “social bookmarking” and one of the first sites to really get (and push) “tagging” as a way to categorize things. Back in the 2004 many of us thought Yahoo! acquiring del.icio.us was going to lead to great things, not just for Yahoo! but for the web itself.
It appeared that del.icio.us was all set to become a success story for Yahoo! but as is often the case, trying to fold what made something great into a larger organization doesn’t always work. In fact, it’s probably rare that it works.
If anything good comes out of this whole thing, it’s the ideas people have, and the code/services that may crop up in the future. Just check out these posts:
I’m proud to say that Jon and Les and I were all, uh “comrades” back during the web’s heyday of the mid-2000’s… I think were we called “bloggers” back then. It’s neat to see their thoughts on this issue. Les has even more insight, as actually he worked on del.icio.us.
So now what? Well, I did get a Pinboard account, and I’m still collecting everything at p2url.com/bookmarks, and both of those are currently syncing with del.icio.us, which (for now) is still the master. I’ll figure out what to do next, but I’m not worried about the data going away. I am interested in what kind of distributed social bookmarks network may come out of this…