Before this moment, our relationship to Delicious had been that of a tick to an elephant. We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help.

Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

Delicious (backed up locally and in Pinboard) has assumed a different role in my life. No longer the bank of preference for instant notes, it’s where I’m putting things that I’ve generally sifted or gone back to (sometimes a number of times). (Of course, some things still seem worth bookmarking at once, but the reason for that can itself turn out to be depressingly ephemeral.) I’m much more interested now, much more able now, to use Delicious as a repository for things which I’ve had the time, and the perspective, to weigh.

Plenty of words have been written over the past few weeks about the apparently imminent demise of Delicious, the social bookmarking site. From reading these various accounts and opinions, it is apparent to me that people used the service in a variety of different ways and to different ends. Here I will outline my own thoughts and experiences, and explain why I will be moving from Delicious to Pinboard.

Notes on tagging and taxonomy.

Don’t depend on Delicious; host your own, pay for it elsewhere, or hope for the best. Use real-time feeds to stitch the bookmarking diaspora back together into topical aggregate indexes.

I’ve not been using Delicious as much lately, having been lured away by simpler sharing services. But, I think there’s a lot of metadata value in tagging that I’m missing out on.

I didn't get to Yahoo! until 2006 (about 9 months after the del.icio.us acquisition), and I was super-excited to see what the plans were for del.icio.us. I felt honored to be in the same company as the del.icio.us guys and people I talked to said they were working with the search team. That seemed right. Then I saw a roadmap for an upcoming Yahoo! Bookmarks 2.0 release and was confused. Being naive, I talked to the Bookmarks PM and asked him why they were releasing a new version of Bookmarks when they had del.icio.us. Wouldn't it make more sense to turn del.icio.us into Yahoo!'s main bookmarking service and begin moving it towards mass-market adoption? The answer was something like "Actually, the products are different. Bookmarks is targeted at mainstream users and del.icio.us is more of a sharing solution for a technology-focused crowd. etc. etc." I was even more confused.

[Yahoo!] killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot of engineers’ time, etc. Perhaps I spent too much time inside that particular sausage factory… I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.

I left Yahoo over two years ago, but prior to that I spent three years running product for Delicious.  Since then I’ve remained a loyal user and supporter.  To this day I keep in touch with former Delicious colleagues and consider many to be friends.  And though I’ve felt that Delicious has been frustratingly slow to evolve in recent years, I’ve always wished the best for the product and the remaining team members.

The leak of a Yahoo slide and a bunch of speculation has led to a burst of signups for Pinboard over the last few days. Despite that, I’m sticking with Delicious.

I’ve heard the argument that we’ve been using Delicious for free all these years, so why should we feel entitled to anything? I for one would have appreciated the opportunity to pay for it. I quite happily pay for Flickr, I pay for web hosting, I’d pay for Twitter too. Yahoo never even attempted to monetize Delicious, aside from a little advertising on the popular bookmarks page, which I don’t think I’ve ever used. Yahoo’s focus on the popular bookmarks page misses the point. I don’t care what everyone has been bookmarking. I care what specific smart people who I trust are bookmarking. Mass trends are occasionally interesting, but only occasionally.

RT @torrez: I made a todo list for anyone interested in duplicating Delicious over the weekend http://bit.ly/fvvDHe

Were the save and share changes all we’ve been doing for the last few months? Not at all. A lot of the changes you shouldn’t see at all as they’re general code performance and maintenance changes that tend to go out with a release of this size. We’ve also been working on other features that aren’t quite ready yet, but most of the core code is ready and will make deploying those changes that much easier once the remaining parts are in place. Beyond those, there were 100 small tweaks throughout the site. Those range from the obvious addition of the Yahoo! logo to adding ‘untagged’ as a bookmark filter in the ‘Display Options’.

Why is storing your bookmarks online such a good idea? For one thing, it makes them accessible on other people’s computers. There’s also the added insurance against something bad happening to your computer, like spilling coffee into it twice in a month, like I did. That’s well and good, but it’s only the tip of the Delicious iceberg. I mean, there are plenty of ways to back up your bookmarks online. Why, I get asked a lot, do I want the whole world looking at my bookmarks? I get something very powerful in return, getting to look at everybody else’s bookmarks. More importantly, I can see how everyone else sorts and annotates their stuff.

A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. A general review of social bookmarking tools, one popular use area of folksonomies, was given in the April edition of D-Lib [1]. In the article the authors elaborate on the approach taken by social classification systems and the motivators behind tagging. They write, "...tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc.... Rather, they are a supplemental means to organise information and order search results."

"We need to keep learning about Everything, not just about the technical skills common to our own field." http://bit.ly/9ytGXq #learning

I'm aware of the shortcomings and inconsistencies inherent in 'tagging' things, especially for social bookmarking like Delicious and Pinboard. I'm therefore interested in improving my use of tags. This article looks at social bookmarking in a library setting, with its 'folksonomy' of tagging, vs. the stricter and more authoritarian Library of Congress system of using tags from a set list.