I’ve been seeing many of my friends and peers jump ship and move their social/online bookmarks to other services (both free and paid) since the Yahoo leak about Delicious being in the sun-setting category of products. Given the volume of outcry over this, I was pretty confident that either Yahoo would change their minds or someone would buy Delicious or someone would replicate Delicious. So, I didn’t worry. I didn’t freak out. I haven’t even made a backup of my bookmarks, although I plan to do that soon just because it’s good to have backups of data.
Now the word is that Delicious will be sold, which is probably for the best. Yahoo certainly didn’t do much with it after they acquired it some years ago. But, honestly, I’m pretty happy with the features Delicious has now, so really don’t care that it hasn’t changed much. However, I do want it to go to someone who will take care of it and continue to provide it to users, whether it remains free or becomes a paid service.
I looked at the other bookmark services out there, and in particular those recommended by Lifehacker. Frankly, I was unimpressed. I’m not going to pay for a service that isn’t as good as Delicious, and I’m not going to use a bookmarking service that isn’t integrated into my browser. I didn’t have much use for Delicious until the Firefox extension, and now it’s so easy to bookmark and tag things on the fly that I use it quite frequently as a universal capture tool for websites and gift/diy ideas.
The technorati are a fickle bunch. I get that. But I can’t help feeling disappointed in how quickly they jumped ship and stayed on the raft even when it became clear that it was just a leaky faucet and not a hole in the hull.
Hmmm, anna, interesting thoughts. I don’t feel like I jumped ship when I signed up for Pinboard, but more that I was preparing myself for the worst. And I picked Pinboard in part because it asked me for money — the thought of losing delicious made me yen for a more guaranteed life aggregator, and so I am exploring Pinboard. If anything, the yahoo leak made me, and perhaps others, aware of how dependent, and thus vulnerable, we had become on a tool with no cashflow model, And we are clearly paranoid enough to think it possible that the plug could be pulled without warning.
I still love delicious, and hope it stays, But I’m more aware know of that love, and that dependence, and am exploring options. I’ve learned that there are alternatives to delicious that i like (I couldn’t say the same about bloglines) and that I am in fact willing to pay a little bit for tools I depend upon. But I didn’t so much jump ship as anticipate being left high and dry.
I’ve heard some positive rumors about potential buyouts. There’s so much potential, I’d love to see it purchased by someone who’s willing to invest the time and effort into pushing delicious forward. It’s changed very little since Yahoo purchased it.
Having never thought of myself as either technorati or fickle, the fact is that my uses of delicious were pretty vital to keeping Cites & Insights going–and that “we’re going to be sold” message was nowhere near reassuring (you know, when I was let go I could have published a post saying “I’ll be employed elsewhere soon”–which wouldn’t make it true). I also saw the Bloglines parallel: Where it was, in fact, purchased–but “it” was now something I found nearly useless.
I won’t argue that you’re wrong for sticking with delicious; if you’re disappointed that I felt it would be irresponsible of me not to find an alternative, that’s unfortunate.