Yahoo! Says Delicious To Get the Boot, Not the Axe 84
geegel writes "In a statement on their Delicious official blog, Yahoo now claims that: '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 that means can be everyone's guess, but at least for now, your delicious accounts are safe."
heh (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't really change anything for me. They fired their people, and now issue a vague statement that implies they are looking for a buyer. So what? And they are disappointed that it got out, but I'm not. It gave me warning I might not have had otherwise.
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I guess it depends on how you use the service. Personally, I never bothered to open an account there, but I'm subscribed to several bookmark RSS feeds, such as this one [delicious.com] belonging to the Open Society Institute (aka Soros Foundation).
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That's true - I just used it as a handy way to store and sync my bookmarks. Their firefox plugin is really nice.
After reading yesterdays thread, I set up an account with Diigo. I went through the import process roughly 24 hours ago - it still hasn't finished. They say they are experiencing heavy loads that have slowed things down. That's not too encouraging really. But I'm really thinking about setting up Scuttle and just using my own site.
I did like browsing what other people were bookmarking on delicious
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Why wouldn't they? Delicious could be coded in, what, a week by a solo coder? With maybe another week or two to code the browser plugins? (I've never coded one for either browser, so I have no real means to estimate that.)
The reality is, delicious isn't that special. Whatever value it might have to some other company is in its users and its data, not the code or the people. Infrastructure is a concern
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I like your estimation technique. You share an attitude with most of my clients - you have no idea how to do something, so it must be easy.
I gotta tell you, I've made a lot more money assuming the other way.
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That theory would work far better if I weren't a web developer by profession.
Maybe there is some hidden complexity to delicious that I do not see; I only use it via browser plug-in as a bookmark sync, not the website itself. But I see an extremely simplistic database with users, bookmarks and tags, the output of which is some extremely simple HTML pages or an RSS feed. Infrastructure, as I already said, is a concern -- but not exactly a staggering one.
What, exactly, are you claiming is going to take l
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With maybe another week or two to code the browser plugins? (I've never coded one for either browser, so I have no real means to estimate that.)
No, I took it from your ass. Now you've managed to impress me even less. Web developer indeed.
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Who said I was poopooing the estimates? I could give some, I've designed and built much more complicated systems, but that's not the point. I was addressing the OP's propensity for dismissing the parts he didn't know how to do as easy. That's a foolish attitude, and insidious if allowed unchecked.
I'm helping. In a mean way, so it sticks. I'm a pro, you might want to learn something here.
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The hard part about del.icio.us is scalability. If it weren't for that I could knock it off in Drupal in a week or less and I'm not much of a web developer. Performance, however, can be a bitch.
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So what you're saying is that we should see a ton of Delicious clones online next Friday?
I always think it's hilarious to watch novice programmers grossly underestimate the amount of time it takes to code a robust application. The same people are wondering why it's taking so long to clean up Diaspora when they could have supposedly coded it in a weekend with some friends and a case of beer.
I'll look forward to seeing your version of Delicious online next week; any other response to this reply would simply b
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I'm a huge fan of Delicious and hate to see it "go", but this is too late. They needed to clarify this IMMEDIATELY. I already researched alternatives yesterday and eventually signed up and paid for (including an "archive account" extra fee) service at pinboard.in and I don't see any reason why I would pay for that service and go back to Delicious in any form. They needed to respond to this in the same day, to catch people in the same cycle of news.
In a couple years, this will be used as an example of how no
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buy it (Score:2)
2-3 potential buyers may have cancelled (Score:1)
yahoo! is just saying, "anybody want to buy it?"
Spreading word like that drops an online services value to absolute zero. An online service lives by user trust.
I really wonder their account closure ratings right now after the news have spread even to mainstream media.
Re:2-3 potential buyers may have cancelled (Score:5, Insightful)
The people I've talked to are not closing their accounts - they are exporting their bookmarks, looking for options, and waiting to see what happens. The fact that Diigo has been completely overwhelmed since the news broke makes me think something like this is happening a lot.
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I researched alternatives. Went with pinboard.in, because they tout themselves as an "anti...social bookmarking service" and are very similar to Delicious. They even use the Delicious API. They charge a one time fee (fine with me, hopefully keeps out spammers and is at least a business model that makes sense). I even decided to pay a little extra for an "archive" account (stores a copy of the page I've bookmarked). Then I deleted my Delicious account. I don't see any reason to keep it, even if they "recover
I will give one single URL (Score:2)
The people I've talked to are not closing their accounts - they are exporting their bookmarks, looking for options, and waiting to see what happens. The fact that Diigo has been completely overwhelmed since the news broke makes me think something like this is happening a lot.
I am giving this as an example how you can completely waste millions sized community in a matter of WEEKS, not even months.
http://www.digg.com/ [digg.com]
Trust me the web (lets call web 2.0) has some amazing speed. Couple of mistakes, you are gone. Your company depends on some person removing you from his/her bookmarks and it takes less than a second.
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I deleted all my bookmarks and closed my account. Yahoo is trying to sell delicious. Most of the money they expect to receive is not from the delicious codebase, but from all the user accounts and bookmark data. If you want to help them make money with your data after being such asshats about the service, go ahead. But I say, fuck 'em.
Time for backup and packing (Score:5, Interesting)
As this is a company who could easily rm -rf entire geocities, easily compressible or archival friendly data, make sure you get a local backup or move your data as soon as today.
Let me also remind they deleted (yes, but with warnings) Yahoo Briefcase right while "cloud based" (sorry!) storage was on rise. Especially in an age where storage networks actually does unbelievable amount of compression built-in (de dupe etc).
My start page is my.yahoo.com for almost a decade now and in all these years, I have befriended some actual Yahoo staff. So if I say backup, trust me and start packing. I wouldn't trust to flickr either for same reasons above. Buy/use a good quality 10 pack DVD-R for God's sake.
How does that happen (Score:1)
My start page is my.yahoo.com for almost a decade now and in all these years, I have befriended some actual Yahoo staff.
1: Set your start page to Google.com
2: Wait a decade
3: ???
4: You've befriended Google staff
Oh it is basic. Act like a human (Score:1)
My start page is my.yahoo.com for almost a decade now and in all these years, I have befriended some actual Yahoo staff.
1: Set your start page to Google.com
2: Wait a decade
3: ???
4: You've befriended Google staff
Some of us were using Yahoo and web while you were shitting your pants and in early days it was easy to find people on IRC/Usenet before AC idiots like you came to web.
You know Yahoo staff and even MS staff are HUMAN beings and they wonder around at the Internet right? If you don't treat people like an asshole, report issues, send feedback like a normal human being, not some sick bastard looking for AC button to satisfy yourself, they eventually become people you can call friends.
Web is still small if you k
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"My start page is my.yahoo.com for almost a decade now and in all these years, I have befriended some actual Yahoo staff."
Boo hoo. Its a business decision, not a personal attack against YOU. Unless you managed to piss off any of your yahoo "friends". Yahoo was a ok service, I suppose, but there are much better. Move to one of those.If you feel entitled to a service and these players keep pissing you off by shutting down and making you have to re-arrange your life every 5 years you can always start your own service. See what its like to run a business, wouldn't that be something?
I never used Del.icio or Flickr (Score:1)
"My start page is my.yahoo.com for almost a decade now and in all these years, I have befriended some actual Yahoo staff."
Boo hoo. Its a business decision, not a personal attack against YOU. Unless you managed to piss off any of your yahoo "friends". Yahoo was a ok service, I suppose, but there are much better. Move to one of those.If you feel entitled to a service and these players keep pissing you off by shutting down and making you have to re-arrange your life every 5 years you can always start your own service. See what its like to run a business, wouldn't that be something?
I only use My Yahoo service and I also check Yahoo mail every 3 days or so. My actual mail provider is Fastmail.fm.
I have absolutely no clue what are you talking about. I am just saying that by my expertise, if a word is out from Yahoo HQ (by accident or otherwise), make sure you start packing. Some people have used and still using del.icio.us in its original purpose and have massive amounts of irreplaceable personal/organised data there. I am doing a favour to them if they don't know what kind of a company
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I wouldn't trust to flickr either for same reasons above.
For some rason, I think flickr is a little different, because I actually pay for it... whereas Del.ici.ous and Geocities were free services.
Don't you suppose they would think twice before closing all our accounts and turning away all our $$$? I don't think Yahoo is that ungreedy.
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OK my english is bad but... (Score:1)
Really, what part of my post says otherwise? Yes I know Yahoo and some people in there and I absolutely know how things went downhill over these years.
They have created/invented amazing things there without using them, they bought companies and couldn't figure what to do with them or integrate it to the gigantic Yahoo utility. They gave up Search which was really performing well for lots of users.
I really wonder why am I the person who gets the blame for simply stating he isn't usual 'Yahoo is dead' troll w
just dump it already (Score:2, Insightful)
Delicious is an anachronism from the early days of web 2.0. Most people share links on Facebook now.
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Not many people in my list of (albeit small but above average) 205 friends use Facebook to share links. Hell, most people don't use it for much of anything it seems. Twitter and Tumblr, however, seem to be much more likely sources for link sharing.
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The point I made when this came out was that Delicious is more hip than Yahoo! as a brand. Were it not for some of their acquisitions Yahoo! might already have gone the way of the Dodo.
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Re:just dump it already (Score:4, Informative)
First, I will never have, nor even tolerate Facebook, and second, link sharing isn't really what I used Delicious for. It's about link collection, archival and retrieval. I have moved my stuff over to Pinboard, which is not only incredibly versatile, but has the subtitle "antisocial bookmarking"... exactly my cup of tea.
Now get off my lawn.
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isn't that the primary use of it? Merely sharing the links with others...meh. What about sharing it with myself? I don't want a bookmark tree with folders and subfolders and links saved to several spots. In my google account, I likewise don't have just the "inbox" label, and
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I don't use delicious to share links, I use it because I'm reading a handy article and I think "huh, in the future, I might want to find this in a few different types of situations...such as [tag name] or [tag name] or [tag name]." isn't that the primary use of it?
hm... No, I think that's the primary use of browser bookmarks, such as those in Firefox 3, unless you have so many bookmarks Firefox would slow to a crawl had you stored them all. Don't you think Evernote is a little more convenient for that?
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uh...except I can't see what my friends tagged as both "linux" and "security" if I'm saving things locally
You just said I don't use delicious to share links.
In other words, you have already given up the social functions of Delicious, so it's not a factor to consider, not that other systems don't have them.
can't use any comp on the internet and get local copies...etc...
You can by syncing the local datastore to cloud-based storage.
No. I do *not* want a tree. I do *not* want bookmarks.
That does not m
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Pull, versus push. I don't tweet about going to the bathroom, nor do I feel it makes any sense to push links out and let people know what I've tagged. But I might pull them - I know that Jim Somebody does vaguely what I do so I check out what he might have tagged as X and Y.
I don't push them. I pull
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I don't tweet about going to the bathroom, nor do I feel it makes any sense to push links out and let people know what I've tagged. But I might pull them - I know that Jim Somebody does vaguely what I do so I check out what he might have tagged as X and Y.
Ok... well, you using a local flatfile, or local software application for your bookmarks certainly does not exclude you using another site for pull; obviously SOMEONE has to share bookmarks for you to be able to pull them. You probably don't have too m
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Opera Link (Score:4, Interesting)
Opera Link [opera.com]
As well Opera's bookmarks include:
1) Typing in the addressbar searches your bookmarks by any of the words/text above.
2) Typing in the QuickFind bookmark panel similarly filters your bookmarks as you type.
3) Typing the "Nickname" in the addressbar will launch that particular bookmark.
If you don't want to sort your bookmarks into folders, the search function would work fine, so long as you "tagged" words into the description.
Ability to:
1) Export your bookmarks to plain HTML file.
2) Import bookmarks from most other browsers: Opera, FF, IE, Safari, Konqueror.
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Great, now all I have to do is . . . only ever use Opera on every device and from every location I ever surf.
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Also, I didn't say that's all I used it for, just how I primarily used it. Seeing what links a friend of mine has saved as "webcomic" is a great way to find a webcomic I might like
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I still have a facebook account, but on it my wife is my brother (and yes, she's female in real life), an old co worker is my sister (he's female), my brother is my father, I'm widowed, I was born about 40 years earlier (makes for fun banner ads!), and I live in Beruit (versus living in northern San Diego).
Cute. Oh I see what you did. You took the point of Facebook and made it work against you. Clever. Those guys will never get any use from YOUR information. Of course, neither will you. Me, I just deleted my account. It is possible. Continuing to use the service and jumping through self-made hoops to obfuscate your data doesn't seem like an alternative to me. I could be wrong, but you seem like a smug, barely technologically literate asshole. All fights, no Admin Rights.
Facebook will be around for a while.
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I stated, in no unclear terms, why I remain on Facebook. My family knows my name, and knows how to find me on there. I'm on there for their benefit. They are also very happy to share all their info to a website that is selling that info. I put in false info to obfuscate the information other people are providing about me. And yes, I'm very technically illiterate. I barely know how to turn a gosh darn
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Pretty half-assed troll. Facebook doesn't offer a bookmarking service and who the hell cares about *sharing* bookmarks? We want to store and access them.
bs detector pegged (Score:3)
Sounds like they are reacting to negative feedback. You generally don't fire everyone working on something if you really expect to sell it to another company.
My concern would be that Yahoo just announced their intention to sell the personal information on all of these users to some outside party. Am I the only one that thinks this could go bad?
Wait, stop the bleeding (Score:3)
In other words: Please stop devaluing our property! We need these users on here, or we won't make the millions, er... thousands, er... hundreds of dollars in selling it off to someone else!
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True, considering they fired the entire team, very little value is left aside from the user base.
It's called the "employee mobility pool" (Score:4, Funny)
The dumpster behind 701 First Avenue, Sunnydale, California is technically "outside of the company", and I'm sure that there are plenty of resources there.
If you get there before the next pickup you may even find about six hundred recently laid-off people looking for jobs. I'm sure that some of them may want to do some "resourcing".
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The dumpster behind 701 First Avenue, Sunnydale, California is technically "outside of the company", and I'm sure that there are plenty of resources there.
If you get there before the next pickup you may even find about six hundred recently laid-off people looking for jobs. I'm sure that some of them may want to do some "resourcing".
Sunnydale: http://i276.photobucket.com/albums/kk30/smgfan777/WALLPAPER%207/SUNNYDALE-HIGH.jpg [photobucket.com]
Sunnyvale: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Yahoo_Headquarters.jpg [wikimedia.org]
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Hah! So Carol Bartz IS the First Evil! I always suspected it. They couldn't hide it just by changing one letter in the town name!
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Yahoo is dusted.
Put a stake in it, it's done.
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Third party removal of contents from a waste bin is illegal in California. The contents in the container are the property of the entity providing waste services, usually the government where the property resides, even if the government entity contracts with a private removal company. Also, the container is normally serviced while still on private property unlike most residential waste and a charge of trespass
Simple... (Score:2)
Possible replacment? (Score:2)
It looks like it should be easy to export your bookmarks from del.icio.us and import the file into Google Bookmarks.
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Google's bookmark service is miserable and lacking in major features. I've been really disappointed by it.
What's Delicious? (Score:1)
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Put it another way: It's a gimmick to have to describe what your tastes and habits so that the owner of this public service can sell its profile of you to adverstisers.
The most insidious thing about all this is to discourage learning and discovery and all change -- all so retailers can make you the target of their ads. Do we really want to exist only in order to make purchases?
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That's sheer nonsense. I have yet to find a single ad on Delicious. On second thought, this is perhaps why Yahoo made this business decision.
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There are no ads on Delicious and the only information they have about you is a username and email address.
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I didn't say they sell ads. I said they sell information.
You don't really need to have a user sign in with name, address and ssn to get some sort of user profile together from the cookies and collate that information with that of other sites, not the least of all would be Yahoo's own cookies from using its mail, tv listings, and whatever else they offer. You don't need lunatic conspiracy theories to believe someone pays good money for data on user habits on the web, whether partially anonymized or not.
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What would make even more sense would be not to waste a few billion dollars buying up companies that have no real value.
Good on Yahoo (Score:2)
Why Buy? (Score:2)
Why exactly did Yahoo buy Delicious in the first place? I see this a lot -- Company A buys Company B, usually for a lot of money, and then a short time later shuts down Company B or sells it for far less than they paid. And yet there never seems to be any consequences for the executives of Company A for wasting a few hundred million (or billion) dollars.
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Yahoo is a solution in search of a problem. Unfortunately, all the problems that can be solved by massive incompetence are already taken.
Seriously? (Score:1)
They're looking at selling or offloading it?
Who in their right mind decides to fire the entire staff and inhouse knowledge base of an asset they are looking at potentially trying to maximise the return on? Doesn't that kinda devalue the asset immensely?
All they have currently is the domain, database and what ever infrastructure has been assigned to the project. Anyone looking at acquiring it would need either get their inhouse staff up to speed very quickly on the entire setup once they got their hands on i
I have already switched (Score:1)
I have already switched to diigo.com
I'll volunteer to run it (Score:1)
I'm sure I have a redundant 100Mhz Pentium system somewhere I can host it on....
Great News! (Score:1)