Yahoo! To Close Delicious

Thwomp writes "A leaked internal presentation from Yahoo shows that Delicious, the popular bookmark sharing site, will be wound down. According to Daring Fireball's John Gruber the whole team was let go just yesterday. It appears that Delicious is just one of the services in Yahoo's portfolio that is going the way of the Dodo."

Comments

the whole team was let go just yesterd

[frovingslosh]

According to Daring Fireball's John Gruber the whole team was let go just yesterday.

Merry Xmas from Yahoo.

Re:the whole team was let go just yesterd

[hairyfeet]

Or maaaaybe...oh I don't know, this is just a thought, I'm just tossing it out here....but maybe they should try to actually do something with the businesses they acquire instead of letting them stagnate almost from the moment of purchase, ala AOHell? If you want to know why Yahoo is on life support, it is quite easy to explain, it is because every damned time they bought a company it spelled DOA for whatever corp they touched. They purchase a property and then almost from that moment there is ZERO promotion, ZERO improvements, and ZERO support. It is like they went on a buzzword bingo scavenger hunt and whenever they bought the next buzzword heavy product they just checked off a box and moved on.

So while it sucks they were let go on Xmas, really they should have been looking for a job the second they became part of the Yahoo "family". Because with anybody with eyes would have noticed Yahoo has been trying to give AOL a run in the "what were we supposed to do with this again?" stupidity business for quite awhile now.

Re:the whole team was let go just yesterd

[whereiswaldo]

This practice of letting people go right before Christmas is just despicable. Besides the obvious human cost, it also reflects VERY poorly on their company. Having worked for a company that did the same thing in the past, I know morale will be very low.

Re:More info beyond Daring Fireball snippet

[timeOday]

Maybe somebody leaked is because they were already "gone." Giving 4% of the company a pink slip for their Christmas "bonus" probably affected morale somewhat. Just guessing.

Re:Current mood: stage 1 denial

[hugortega]

money

Worst Decision by Yahoo

[crf00]

This is the dumbest move I see Yahoo doing, for shutting down the only Yahoo product left that is ACTUALLY USEFUL. (besides Flickr, but I don't use it anyway)

Seriously I am horrified and disappointed if this decision is for real. I have over 300 bookmarks stored in Delicious, and Delicious has been an extremely useful search engine for me. Because the search is based on social tagging that has gone through by human mind, Delicious is far more powerful than even Google for generic terms search, especially for single term queries that are too generic to return any useful results from other search engines. I don't know why such a useful site has become so less popular, but I believe it is just largely due to the lack of marketing and ignorance by Yahoo since the acquisition.

So far I don't know any other social bookmarking site that is better than Delicious. Perhaps I should start searching, but if anyone here in Slashdot knows one, please do tell me.

Anyway for those who are desperate like me to backup their Delicious bookmarks, here is the export link.

Re:Worst Decision by Yahoo

[Alex Zepeda]

Probably because Yahoo! ran them into the ground. That's what Yahoo! does. They buy things (they don't innovate) and ruin them. They're like a smaller, hipper Microsoft.

I use Flickr, Delicious, and probably a few other things that are Yahoo brands. They've actively meddled with Flickr making the UI worse with each revision. Instead of focusing on reliability and core features, they've added a bunch of asinine bling. With Delicious they've merely left it alone to rot for the most part. Actually I'm fairly surprised that they're shutting Delicious down because they just pushed a UI update in the past month or so. I rather liked Delicious because it let me synchronize my bookmarks across different browsers and because it let me categorize my bookmarks easily.

As far as I'm concerned, this is further proof that Carol Bartz is a first class asshole who knows shit for all about running a business. Sure, the stockholders were pissed when Jerry Yang refused to sell out to Microsoft but at least Yang had decent reasons (preserving the brand identity and corporate culture) for doing what he did. Bartz is just another short-term profits first type CEO. Like Fiorina, Hurd, and Nardelli, Bartz thinks her slash and burn style is a one-size fits all type thing when in fact it's a one-size fits none.

Re:They are also kiling Altavista

[snarkh]

Perhaps being passed around from Digital Equipment to Compaq to HP had something to do with it not being successful.
But in mid/late 90's it was the best search engine by far.

Please don't worry

[hannson]

Your bookmarks and data will be "safe" in the cloud.

Re:They are also kiling Altavista

[BeanThere]

I think he meant 'easy' as in were in the best market position to be able to do so, as they were once one of the (if not the?) most popular search engines on the Web --- a position in which, by definition, you have it theoretically easier than *anyone else*, i.e. it would've been easier for them to be the next Google than Google. But the Google guys worked both smarter and harder. In that context, "easy" is indeed the best term and I understood it perfectly clearly.

Re:the whole team was let go just yesterday

[macraig]

Can you think of a better time to do it? That's some bonus checks that didn't get inked. The savings probably went straight to the CEO's belly.

Re:More info beyond Daring Fireball snippet

[Megane]

Can someone tell me exactly when Yahoo stopped being synonymous with vile and savage creatures, with filthy and with unpleasant habits, and became an expression of glee?

Stallman was right: Careless computing

[jabberw0k]

Curious this comes just a couple days after RMS warned us about the dangers of entrusting others with our personal or corporate data: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/14/stallman-cloud-computing-careless-computing/

Re:not surprised

[Seumas]

I'm confused by your statement. I don't see a way in which Delicious is anything like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit? Those sites are link-spam sites with comment threads attached to them. Delicious was a database of your bookmarks, online that you could categorize, tag, and utilize just like a bookmark (most browsers have an extension to allow it to replace your actual bookmarks). You could also view other people's bookmarks and view the current most popular (or simply most recent) bookmarks of the entire collective. The fantastic thing about Delicious is that it isn't really any sort of "community" or "social experience". It's just your fucking bookmarks, stored online and that made it awesome.

Yahasbeen.

[fyngyrz]

Yahoo is a has-been. It was at its most useful when it was a maintained tree of useful sites, essentially spam free. Then they got slow about updating it. THEN they decided you should pay or they'd drag their heels and probably not even "get to" your submission. Then (surprise) no one wanted to play with them anymore, and they shut the whole thing down. That's the history of Yahoo's actual tech. Today, they are useful to me only because they bought Flickr. I appreciate the service, but I don't think of it as "Yahoo's tech."

Car analogy:

It's like the difference between a fellow who buys a car, and one who has built one of equal quality. They both end up with cars, so if you're simply looking for a ride, they're equal. But the guy who built his car deserves a lot more respect than the guy who bought one.

Yahoo built a car, fouled the paint job, ran it into a few immovable objects, junked it, and bought another. I respect the original build, and sincerely regret that they screwed it up. That they bought another, I don't find particularly notable. I do like to ride in it, though.