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Please don't get me wrong, but I never understood what "social" bookmarking is useful for. As long as my supposed ignorance persists, I'm sorry to crash the party with a simple question: why is Delicious relevant?
Assuming many or most here think it is relevant, it should be possible to respond to my question reasonably, without buzzwords and with only moderate downvoting.
It's funny, I started to write a reply explaining my love of Delicious. But the more I articulated the reasons, the more I realized I loved what it was, and don't really use it anymore.
1. Before browsers could sync my bookmarks across multiple computers, posting them to delicious was the best way to have access to them anywhere.
2. Before instapaper let me save articles to read later, Delicious was a great way to have a tagged backlog of things to explore whenever I have freetime.
3. Before Twitter, the best way to know what your favorite developers or designers were thinking about was to follow what they were bookmarking on Delicious.
4. Before HN, looking at the usage of tags and stories per tag helped me figure out what technologies or topics were growing in popularity and find out what to read first about them.
Delicious predates all the social media hype and is probably better thought of as "Web 2.0" application. Basically, it's Flickr for URLs. It's just a dead simple way of saving and tagging URLs. The social aspect is more of an ancillary benefit, the idea being that when you get millions of people organizing links by tag, some interesting structures start to emerge...e.g. you can generate something like a tag cloud for the entire web.
If the above analysis sounds dated, that's because it is. Conceptually, Delicious is really an app straight out of 2006. But like Flickr, it's one of the handful that's worth having around in more or less original form.
The key to grokking Delicious btw is that it's not for "bookmarks" like the ones you probably have on your Bookmark Bar in Chrome right now. It's for articles or links of interest that you might want to reference later. Presumably there are other services that do or claim to do this better, but I have yet to find one that's stripped down to the same level of usefulness as Delicious.
I think I only use 20% of Delicious, but it is the 20% I love it for.
To me, Delicious is like a really organized attic or "backlog" of interesting stuff I found online and want to remember for later. It allows me to find things back because of the tags, but it doesn't take as much time as writing blog posts and I don't have to think about burdening my followers the way I have to with Twitter. I actually wrote about it a while back: https://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/614 (see comments)
I don't use the social features at all and I am really curious what direction Delicious will take under new management.
I'm an extroverted hoarder. The only way I can close a tab in my browser is by saving it forever and broadcasting it to the entire internet.
Only half joking, I have 134 tabs open.
People like to be building something. Delicious is less edited than the wikipedia but it's still a massive datastore, semantically tagged, and filtered by its users. And if Delicious would get off their cans (and it looks like they will) it could be the single best way to share a link.
My take is this: searching delicious for tags of my interests always turned up cool results I would never find in Google.
Example: I write software for, and have a strong interest in, professional photographers and I keep bookmarks of my favorite photographers for inspiration. Many of them were found via delicious.
I used to use del.icio.us as a sort of online magazine. I would read the feed for posts tagged "python" and see all the blog posts about Python that people were reading that day. My usage was very similar to the way people use Twitter and Hacker News today.
2 things -- (1) best way to keep your bookmarks organized, synced, available everywhere in any browser + (2) finding interesting links of other people.
(2) is very interesting because "rating" on Delicious is not a vanity contest (e.g. Facebook) and people aren't rating because they "agree" with an article (e.g. HN / Reddit).
Rating on Delicious is implicit, the action itself (bookmarking) serves another direct purpose to the user; people are bookmarking stuff when they want to return to that article -- much like how Google's ranking algorithm works. Yes, it could be gamed, but it's not a high-priority for spammers yet, and I still find Delicious to be a very low-noise source for interesting stuff (much, much more useful than HN; basically I come here for the comments only).
And as an example, searching for Ruby gives you plenty of tutorials in the very first results, searching for "Google" gives links to their interesting assets (like their Fonts directory) -- people are more unlikely to bookmark flames / yellow-journalism; as that pollutes their own database of links.
I saw a comment saying it's an app from 2006 -- well, if that's true, 2006 was a lot better than 2011.
I think it's mostly useful to keep track of all of the interesting stuff you've found on the web, so you can quickly find "that interesting article you remember reading about the javascript 'this' keyword" without searching the entire internet.
The social part is, I think, less interesting but occasionally handy (ex. here are all the interesting things I've read about javascript recently: http://www.delicious.com/tlianza/javascript ) and I think the aggregated data could be interesting, but as Digg's woes have shown, it's proven challenging to make a compelling experience around it.
the community is why I still go back however i joined because browser bookmarks were a pain, syncying them was a pain and having an RSS feed of our bookmarks instead of native within the app just made sense. The social aspect was just icing on the cake, and at the time (think Digg at it's height) social-everything was hot.
back to the community...
When I need to find a good link or resource related to the web design/developer market searching delicious shows me what other people have bookmarked. It's like Google but only results which have been liked by users, so much so that they wanted to save it for later.
I still think that's one of the most powerful aspects of this small-ish community. The problem lies when you scale it, as I have no interest in searching the bookmarks of the CNN/Facebook/YouTube crowd.
Kind of like why Digg was so great. In the beginning it was news submitted and voted on by geeks like me
"AVOS is a new Internet company, led by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. AVOS is located in San Mateo, California"
I'm surprised I hadn't heard of that company before. I thought these two were still working at YouTube. Are they?
"YouTube (…) which was acquired by Google 18 months later for $1.76B"
I was surprised of seeing that as well, since the price I have seen everywhere else was $1.65B. I guess they know that better than anyone else but why the difference?
around 14 days ago I updated my browser to firefox 4, and all my delicious bookmarks that were in tag clouds on my deliciousbar disappeared - silently deleted. They weren't to be found anywhere, not in my tagcloud, not in my history not on delicious site. I e-mailed them but didn't get a reply, and now it seems I've lost years worth of bookmarks that were important to me.
I'll never use delicious again.
(I've been running social bookmarking site, Faves.com, since 2005).
I still think there is a largely unmet need that fits into the "Social Bookmarking" niche. But I don't think "Social" is the best way to think about it.
As an avid user (of Faves.com, in my case) - I use it for (in order of importance):
1. Pack Rat - I don't ever want to loose a link I
found interesting enough to want to recall later.
2. Personal Search - I need a great search interface
to quickly find anything I've saved (search across
tags, and comment text).
I think I want a well integrated system that spans:
- Personal Bookmarking
- Personal Knowledge Base w/ Search
- Topic Forums
- Commenting system
- Micro-blogging/publishingI just discovered this when I tried to bookmark something on Delicious. I am positively surprised that they actually asked me if I wanted to give my personal information to Avos. This is the way it should be.
One critical note though, I went to http://blog.delicious.com/ expecting to read about this, but there is nothing about the acquisition there. If this does not warrant a blog post, what is a blog for?
Probably a lot of historical users will never tick the box to allow their data to be transferred, and that data will fall off the web, or at best be archived. That would happen even if there was not a time limit for users to take action; June is likely the time limit. There has already been some work on scraping an archive of Delicious and that is going to pick up steam.
On the one hand, they seem to be doing things right with giving users control over their data, and complying with their ToS. Pity this means the data that got siloed away will be lost. Even when everyone does everything right, data silos are not good in the long term.
I've switched to Pinboard.in, and couldn't be happier. Still, great news for Delicious users!
cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome... and in case that goes, image: http://i.imgur.com/voNw9.png
Does anybody know if any Yahoo employees are going to AVOS at the same time? (Also, are there even any employees with full-time responsibilities on Delicious?) Is AVOS going to try to re-hire some of the old Del.icio.us team?
This is good news but I am thinking that things at Delicious might be a bit rocky as new admins adjust. If you're a happy Pinboard.IN user, or use some other service, it's not necessarily a reason to switch today.
Just filled out the opt-in form (https://secure.delicious.com/settings/optin). Can't wait to see what they do with it. Note to the new owners: if you charge, I'll gladly pay.
Is Delicious in good hands? There is no place like localhost: http://i.imgur.com/KGVzN.png (funny)
Congrats!
The URL leads to a 404, but the press release is at just http://avos.com
When the info leaked that Yahoo was thinking about dumping Delicious, I wrote a Chrome Webapp that lets one scrape bookmarks from Delicious, corresponding to lists of tags (any bookmark, not just your own).
It's still out there (and still works): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nbahmnpelbdcmkpllm...
Tbey are building a search engine. This is data source of human proportions.
How much did they pay for delicious?
Has anybody reviewed the terms & conditions, privacy policies etc. Is there anything in them to make me concerned that Avos will do anything with my data that I won't like above and beyond what the existing Delicious T&C were?
I presume these guys have taken over Delicious because they see it as a good business opportunity and I'd like to know that their opportunity isn't going to be at my expense.
I use it along with a team of people who tag stuff according to a particular taxonomy. My scripts pull a bunch of those tags out through the api and cache them on a local server where we can do whatever we like with them to show them to readers. It's a really good way to do collaborative editing or curating of new content. Anyway, I'm glad that it will be sticking around!
I'm all in for Delicious. I love it and support and want to see it alive and not rotting in Yahoo.
One thing I didn't understand though, is Joshua Schachter's reaction to the news by tweeting: "inbox asplode!" (https://twitter.com/joshu/status/63294731077160960)
Can someone explain?
I went from being an avid Delicious user to using Pinboard instead. I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens now, and hopefully there are so cool stuff coming that I'll go back to being a fanboy again. This is (hopefully) amazing news!
Apparently nobody reads the TOS, because clicking the TOS link leads to the press release.
Somebody installs wp-super-cache[0] in that poor dying Wordpress blog.
Glad to see delicious itself not dying.
Good for all delicious users.It's time to innovate the social bookmark again.
I used delicious years ago, but only for the bookmark syncing. I switched to foxmarks when it started, then eventually the built in sync of firefox and chrome. Never cared about the social aspect of it all.
Great News!!! As a long-time Delicious user, I'm glad to see that it will continue on. I'm looking forward to any enhancements, but hoping the core of the service does not change too much.
Good example to show every area of Internet needs innovation.
Bookmarking is as old as the first web browser. It's great that a great team is trying to save communities and innovate in this area.
I just used delicious last night for the first time in years and through weird linkage discovered angry video game nerd which I find to be one of the best web shows ever.
In case you are still looking for the other setups, do give http://Pinboard.com a spin. One time pay, but very nice.
That's GREAT news. Delicious is one of the web apps I can't live without. Hope the new company can update the firefox plugin such that I can upgrade to Firefox 4.
I wonder if they're hiring ... I would love to work on delicious, was about 6 months out from writing a bookmarking service for myself.
Does anyone know what their motivation of buying it ? I'm pretty sure they could write this in a weekend in python.
For notes and bookmarks I'm using thinkery.me, is there any reason why I should invest my time into Delicious?
hmph, this one caught me by surprise..... more infos: http://www.delicious.com/help/transition
I can finally delete my yahoo account.
How much did they pay?
just transfered my delicious a/c to AVOS
is Google buying Delicious next?
Dead.