(2010-12-16) Yahoo Layoffs Shutdown Delicious And Others

Yahoo laid off 600 people, and is closing Del.icio.us, Yahoo Buzz, and other sites.

• Some explanation for its fate.

Les Orchard, who worked at Delicious for awhile, confesses he's been using it less lately, even though he recognizes what he's giving up. What happened? Other channels became rewarding, and my sharing habits fragmented. Google Reader released a sharing bookmarklet, so I started using that. More people I know started using Facebook, so that became more attractive. And, even though it kind of annoys me, I sometimes spam links to Twitter when I think they’re particularly interesting. But now that I think about it, I’m missing out. All these sharing services I’ve started using are one-click, lazy affairs with no particular drive toward tagging. My only intentional input into the process is to point and nod. Consequently, they facilitate sharing much more than search or recall, in that the richness of Meta Data extracted from me is reduced. Delicious kind of tricked me into doing all three at once, but newer services are more focused on me as a social entity... Delicious extracted useful work from me, both for myself and others. It’s harder to find things again, thanks to missing metadata and the ephemeral nature of sharing on the real-time web. I think there’s a place for Delicious, if only for those of us who like to keep track of what we’ve found on the web and share the results. I suspect that may be a limited, though highly motivated audience.

• Update: he thinks that self-hosting of your own bookmarks plus integration via something like PubSubHubBub could work.

• Some Self Hosting options, including the Python-based (oy, Google App Engine and Tornado) SelfIcious and the Couch App-based ScrumptIous.

I wonder whether they're making any attempt to sell delicious?

Maybe Joshua Schachter could buy it for a dollar and install some team to keep it running... He supposedly had some grandiose visions that were never realized...

Hmm, how about Twitter?

• Update: Dave Winer ponders whether thinking about a federated Delicious would create progress toward an Open Twitter...

Or the guys who bought XMarks? (They probably don't have the resources...)

Jon Udell wonders whether a user-owned CoOp could be the answer.

My behavior

• this WikiLog is a lot like a tagged bookmark space, though obviously not integrated into anyone else's stuff
• I use Google Reader, so I "Share" posts there which I enjoy but not might get around to including in the WikiLog.
• if I discover a good link via Twitter I'll Re Tweet it.
• if I discover an interesting page through any means other than Google Reader, and might not include it in WebLog, I'll use Twitter to share it.
• if I find a page I'll want in my WikiLog while reading on my phone, I'll email the url to myself (Share/GMail). I'm not always great about actually handling those emails. But I don't think I'd want to auto-add a new entry into the WikiLog because sometimes multiple things go into the same WikiLog page. I've also considered having a daily LinkBlog page to auto-add these too, but that seems kinda pointless.
• I could see myself going back to using a Social Bookmarking service instead of some of those things, esp if easy to do on Android (integrated into Share menu). (I think I ran into Delicious issues with Yahoo sign-in.) (It would have to support tags heavily.)
  • PinBoard has an Android plugin I think
  • Diigo?
  • StumbleUpon?

Apr27'2011 update: YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have bought it, creating a new AVOS company.