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

More info beyond Daring Fireball snippet

[xmas2003]

Tech Crunch and All Things D. Sounds like the Yahoo folks aren't too happy about the word leaking out - "whoever it is, gone!

With Yahoo shutting down Del.icio.us, where will we bookmark things such as these delicious Christmas Lights ... HO-HO-HO! ;-)

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:More info beyond Daring Fireball snippet

[Cryacin]

Can someone tell me exactly when Yahoo! stopped being synonymous with the expression of glee, and became an adjective describing the people running the company?

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?

Yahoo! and Delicious

[Flector]

There are no words.

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.

now..

[PixetaledPikachu]

Let's hope Yahoo will buy facebook next

Re:now..

[MrEricSir]

I hope Yahoo will buy Yahoo.

man

[j00r0m4nc3r]

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth

Re:man

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what she said.

Sad

[Monoman]

I like delicious and the FF toolbar to manage all of my bookmarks. Can we have some replacement suggestions?

Going the way of the Dodo...

[Locke2005]

You mean hunted into extinction because they were Delicious?

Re:What is it?

[mazumi]

To put it simply, it's a social bookmarking site. It was great though because it integrated with Firefox in such a way that for me, it totally replaced the native bookmarking function. The site had a very simple UI too. And because all the bookmarks are databased I'm able to access them from anywhere. You can also tag and cross-reference the links you bookmark. I have dozens of recipes saved on Delicious, and almost every night I'll access them on my smartphone while I'm cooking or baking. I am really, really disappointed that Delicious is going away.

Are they that broke?

[dex22]

Yahoo must have decided the bad publicity of making people redundant right before Christmas was still less than the cost of keeping them on the payroll for one more month.

Low, Yahoo!

Re:Current mood: stage 1 denial

[hugortega]

money

Re:What am I supposed to do now?

[he-sk]

You can export your bookmarks here: https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export

It's a standard Netscape bookmark file, so I expect other services to be able to import from it. But I haven't researched it yet.

Yahoo may leave us in out in the cold soon

[vlueboy]

It is beginning to be a problem that Yahoo is dying slowly. First, they started compressing pictures that used to be fullsized in their popular "Groups" 10 years ago. Then, they started removing Briefcases. Last year, I had to review my Geocities files for anything important before they removed it. This year, their Hotjobs service got merged with Monster.com, so I'll lose my account there too.

I use Yahoo mail to get around the all-too-popular mailbox purge that the more "hip" webmails use. That is to avoid being forced into a paywall when I stop checking mail. Seeing that they are downsizing and the frequency of their cuts is increasing, I'm have to move all 12 years' worth of my mail and profile data elsewhere before it dies. I don't want it to be warningless like when WHQuestion closed down and everyone migrated to KnowPost but lost all their pictures, answers and intersting conversations with other great minds. I don't want my posts and attachments here to go the same way. Sadly, two more years like that and Yahoo will surely be dead, like Altavista. Funny thing is, I just found out Yahoo owns them now. Acquisitions don't always mean the old clients stay with the new boss, which might be Google or something, and my data will be open for a greater evil then.

Now that I think about my knowledge of Facebook, wiping Yahoo data now won't help keep it safe; "delete" doesn't exist when there's money to be made off of my time.

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:Worst Decision by Yahoo

[loimprevisto]

I have been using delicious for a very long time. I have almost a thousand bookmarks collected over the past 5 years. I use it to tag things that I find interesting and will want to reference later, as a search engine to explore tags and find relevant sites when I'm getting interested in a new subject, and to be able to reference bookmarks from work or any other computer I find myself at. I have not seen much spam at all; the only time I ran into links that were obviously spammy was when checking out porn related tags... and even then it wasn't terrible.

It was a good service. I was a little worried when they got bought by Yahoo, and now I'm sorry to see it go. I've seen Diigo and Xmarks tossed around in this discussion as alternatives- I hope they are as useful as del.icio.us was.

They are also kiling Altavista

[lhaeh]

From looking at the leaked slide, they are getting rid of Altavista which has more meaning for me. Delicious as just another Web 2.0 company, but Altavista was an early pioneer on the web and could have easily been what Google is now.

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.

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:They are also kiling Altavista

[Mana Mana]

Are you kidding? Yes AV was the first major search engine but you seem to forget or be ignorant of how it sold search positions AND how it bragged to the IT media how AV was farsighted, how that approach was the way forward, and only a fool could think otherwise. That and untargeted display advertisement was their doom. Now you say that's 20/20 hindsight thinking, but, here on /. concurrently it was discussed and highlighted how their approach was completely wrong and how time would prove it so. And it came to pass, and not too long afterward the ascendancy among geeks of alternative engines was apparent. I have no love lost nor nostalgia for them, their results sucked hard at the time, we were all fed up with their bad quality never mind the paid results.

Their domain was disconnected for years and sold repeatedly at base prices. They tried to come back as an mp3 engine for a while but then the mafiaa got into the ass kicking game.

Re:They are also kiling Altavista

[gmack]

It was... but then Google had the idea to not actually trust what web pages said about their own content. I really don't miss the large set of search exclusions I had to use back in those days to avoid links designed to game the search engines.

Re:They are also kiling Altavista

[PopeRatzo]

The real tragedy here is the destruction of the community.

Welcome to the new, improved, consolidated Internet. Prepare for a lot more communities to die if we don't get Net Neutrality.

And yes, this does have something to do with Net Neutrality.

Re:They are also kiling Altavista

[Seumas]

Except, it isn't what Google is.

Delicious, on the other hand, is kind of the de-facto online bookmarking resource, as far as I'm concerned. They have just enough features with none of the clutter and crap of the other competing sites. It's the only Yahoo! service I use (in fact, I forgot to mention it in another thread when I mentioned that I don't use any Yahoo! stuff -- because I had forgotten they purchased Delicious).

Delicious is an actual useful service and it seems that if you can monetize every other page on the net in some way, you should *certainly* be able to monetize Delicious pages in some way (not that it should cost that much to run a few servers churning out Delicious results for users). I always felt Delicious offered a real "zeitgeist" of the web at any given moment.

Oh well, if they don't want the business, I'm sure others will. I'll just miss how simplistic and non-bloated they were. Everything else tries to be too social or have too many bells and whistles.

Re:not surprised

[Kelson]

They're not quite the same, though. Delicious has always been at least in part about personal use: Sure, it would be cool if someone else saw this neat site I bookmarked and also liked it, but really I'm posting it so that I can find it myself later, since I might not be on the same computer.

Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon, however, are very much about promotion^H^H^H^H^Hsharing, and if you post things just for your own use, they'll get treated as junk or spam.

Re:not surprised

[Reilaos]

I didn't think of Digg nor Reddit really in the same was as I looked at Delicious. Delicious was where I'd shove articles and the like which I found interesting, but wouldn't revisit often enough to warrant space on my browser's bookmark bar.

Digg and Reddit were places for 'news' and such. You'd put things you'd suspect others would like, as opposed to say, bookmarking the javadoc to a plugin API, or a deal on a particular gadget you've been looking at. I didn't think of those two as a bookmarking service.

He who laughs last...

[WWWWolf]

I didn't want to use del.icio.us, because by the time I started using social bookmarking, it was already owned by Yahoo!, and I specifically wanted something that might have been independent.

So I started using ma.gnolia. Awesome, fast service with nice little features and general Web 2.0-friendliness all around. They just failed to make working backups. Boom.

So I started using Twine. Leet folksonomic RDF-what-the-fuckery. Slowish. Yawn. Never quite figured out if it was possible to import bookmarks there. And by the time I started sort of getting interested of what other features the service supported, the thing got bought out. So much for that thing.

So I started using Simpy. An old service. No frills, but also rather fast, and rather well-functional. Did exactly what I wanted it to do. Even let me download a backup of the bookmarks if or when I wanted to. I said "yeah, whatever, I'll take a look at it later on" and wandered off. Surely this service wouldn't get off the net while I was away for a while? Wrong! They got eaten by fucking Reuters and shut down. Why? Why? Millions of victims demand answers, Reuters.

At this point, a few little doubts had started to come to my mind about the whole social bookmarking idea. People said "Ha ha! That's what you'll get for not doing the logical thing and using Delicious! We're old, we're established, we're a known brand. Yahoo! can't possibly kill us."

*sigh* *rueful headshake*

Folks, if you want a good example of my favourite Web 2.0 services, look at GitHub, because GitHub demands that you make local backups of your stuff, and you can migrate your stuff on another Git host in 5 seconds flat for whatever damn reason you happen to have in your head. Why can't we do the same thing to other Web 2.0 sites?

Re:Part of the 600

[gstoddart]

Not too surprises how many bookmarking/aggregating sites do you need?

Just one, and it's been del.icio.us for around 5 years or so.

Please don't worry

[hannson]

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

Cloud-based services -- put your trust in the air!

[petsounds]

If this is not a tailor-made argument for not trusting cloud-based services, I don't know what is. I don't care how "do no evil" your corporation-of-choice is; you're in their playground. They make the rules and break the rules at their whim (or the government's whim).

Export your bookmarks while you still can: curl --user petsounds:sebad0h -o delicious_bookmarks.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'

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:Current mood: stage 1 denial

[fotoguzzi]

Bargaining stage: Could del.icio.us buy itself back? How much money would yahoo want for the whole thing?

Re:Got an actual source?

[Un pobre guey]

I overheard this guy over at the Starbucks in Sunnyvale about a half a mile from Yahoo, and he said some chick told another guy in line that her friend got really drunk the night before and the guy she ended up with in a bathroom stall (she didn't know his name) in The City said he knew a girl who used to work at Yahoo that was still seeing a guy from AMD who was buying a sandwich at one of those places near Lawrence and Arques about a month ago and he thought he heard some Indian guys at a table talking about how some chick was totally fucked up at an office party and was telling everyone how she heard some older guys in suits in a parking lot bragging about how they got blown by some girl who claimed she worked at Yahoo and said that she heard they were thinking about laying a few people off.

That's almost first hand info, Dude.

Re:Cloud-based services -- put your trust in the a

[petsounds]

Yup, paste fail. Sadly slashdot still doesn't allow post-submission editing.

Re:Web 2.0 just isn't profitable.

[mysidia]

Probably true... Web 2.0 gave rise to Bubble 2.0, which soon enough will give rise to Crash 2.0, I am afraid.

Exactly when Yahoo management became yahoos

[ron_ivi]

IMHO that's when they stuck some hollywood exec (Semel) in who knew nothing about the internet in 2001.

ISTM he was so enamored by AOL buying Time Warner he changed Yahoo from being the epitome fo the internet into a AOL-wanabe-clone.

This is the guy who turned down the chance to buy Google for one billion dollars; and then again for 3 billion; and the same guy who shared Yahoo confidential info with China's government.

Yahoo's Geocities could have been Facebook+MySpace.
Yahoo Mail could have been gmail.
Yahoo's Delicious could have been stumbleupon+twitter+digg.
Yahoo's Overture could have been Google Adsense+Adwords
Yahoo's Altavista could have been google search.

But instead Yahoo's turning into little more than a reseller of Bing search results.

Re:Exactly when Yahoo management became yahoos

[crossmr]

actually Geocities was originally a network. A long time ago all the sites were set up in neighbourhoods. With numbers similar to house numbers. I was actually a community leader in the late 90s and we'd help with taking care of various neighbourhoods. Later they got rid of the hierarchy and made it all flat.

Re:Cloud-based services -- put your trust in the a

[petsounds]

The idea that any cloud-based service is free is a bit of a misnomer I think. Any time you post data to one, you trade the use of the service for insight and/or facts about your life.

sorry to break the news, but

[Flector]

In the future, the usual web host will be anonymous, have sql/php, be untrackeable.

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:What is it?

[LionKimbro]

del.icio.us is one of the best research tools on the Internet, -- especially for keeping abreast of innovations in the programming world.

It works like this:

You're working on text processing in Python, or something. So you search delicious for "python" and "textprocessing."

You go through the results, most of which are fairly generic.

But when you find something interesting -- you don't stop there: You ask, "Who was this person who thought this was interesting?"

Then you look at *that person's* tags under "Python". Do they look interesting? That is: Is this person looking for things that are interesting and relevant to you? They aren't bookmarking the ordinary mainstream things, that is.

Then you add that person to your *network.* Get a group of about 10 interesting individuals into the network.

Then search for "python" and "python textprocessing" in that network -- and now you start to get very, very interesting results, consistently.

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.

Re:What is it?

[Seumas]

Delicious was a bookmarking service that stored your bookmarks online. You tagged them and they were searchable both through the web interface and through your browser, with extensions (in fact, you could entirely replace your browser's bookmarking system). You could also see other people's bookmarks or view a collective stream of most recent/popular links, if you wanted. Mostly, it was just a great service for storing your bookmarks so that they were always accessible through any service that had a web interface. You have Weave/Sync now, in Firefox. And Chrome has its own thing. But with Delicious, you could use any browser or device and not worry about it.

It wasn't a discussion site or a social network or a voting site or a daily news site or even necessarily a place to go to find cool links. It was just a great place to store and access your own links. I've personally got several thousand bookmarks on it dating back about five or six years. I'll export them and find a replacement service, but Delicious really had it nailed. The alternatives I've seen (a few years ago, at least) worked poorly or had too many functions that cluttered things.

I can't imagine it costs that much to operate. Especially if you only have under a million users on it, today. A database, a few servers, and some bandwidth. The site itself hasn't changed in ages and I don't think the API has, either. Hell, I'd pay five bucks a year for a subscription to it.

Re:Net Neutrality

[TaoPhoenix]

Not sure quite where you're headed with that note.

This seemed to me to be more about "corporate boredom" aka ROI calculations. Put another way, it's like the blockbuster mentality of movies.

I liked the Long Tail mood of the net for a long time. Get an idea, and sure enough, a 40 person forum already existed for it.

Now these megacorps are closing down iconic net stuff, *instead of giving someone else a chance to spin it off*.

Yahoo Video Also Closing

[Roblimo]

Got this notice in my Yahoo email inbox on Dec. 15:

Dear Yahoo! Video user,

After careful consideration, we will be removing all general user-generated content upload capability and user-uploaded video from Yahoo! Video. As a result, your videos, user profiles, ratings, favorites, and playlists will no longer be available after March 14, 2011. User video content from Yahoo! Video that remains embedded on third party sites will no longer be playable after March 14, 2011.

Available on your profile page is a software utility that will allow you to download the videos you have uploaded to Yahoo! Video to your computer through March 14, 2011. You can find your profile by clicking on the 'My Video' tab or going to http://video.yahoo.com/mypage.

Once you download your videos, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video.

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Yahoo! Video.

If you have any questions about this change, please visit our FAQ section, or contact Customer Care.

The Yahoo! Video Team

Yahoo has TWO things that don't suck...

[MoxFulder]

... Delicious and Flickr. They just killed Delicious, and I'm hoping Flickr isn't so far behind.

I used to use Yahoo Mail, which was a great webmail service for its time... in 2000. I also used Yahoo Auctions until that folded. Before Google, I relied on the human-assisted Yahoo Directory for my web searches. I liked Yahoo Games, when they didn't have much besides pool and scrabble and word games.

But all of Yahoo's services have turned into ad-laden, bloated interfaces with out-of-date technology. It seems that the company has been unable/unwilling to innovate and has just been milking their previously respected brand for ad revenue. Flickr and Delicious were the only two services that seemed to resist this trend :-/.

I guess it's time to export my Delicious bookmarks and find an alternative host for them :(. SimPy and Del.irio.us used to be a couple of pretty nice open-source clones, but seem to have disappeared. Anybody else have a recommendation for a site with similar functionality, clean interface, and good browser addon support?

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.

Google's not all that

[fyngyrz]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Google's searches really turn up a lot of trash for me most of the time. Google ranks pages by how much they're referenced from one another, and what that does is uses the average level of attention and interest of the crowd - but the crowd these days is the usual Gaussian, not at all the original crowd of technical people, and consequently -- Google's search results reflect that.

One thing Yahoo *really* did better was class types of sites and put them together into a sensible tree; if I was looking for a particular type of software, finding a really good selection of it - if one existed - was easy. On Google, it's refine, refine, refine because the search results are *loaded* with spam, link-farms, and just generally junk.

I run a few websites, some of which are quite popular, and a trend right now is people buying one line text ads - paying fairly dearly for them, too - so that Google will see that one of my popular sites references some other site, and so ups their search ranking. The link of course is nothing but financially driven, and really has no reflection at all on the value of the linked site... but that's how Google rolls. The end result is the sites with the money climb in the rankings.

On the original Yahoo index, if you offered, say, a C compiler, you were in the list with the other people who offered a C compiler. Alphabetically. Wasn't about who bought what. That was *great*. Then Yahoo got slow. Not so great. THEN Yahoo decided you had to pay to be listed. And that was the end of Yahoo's useful tech, just that quickly. Poof!

But Google hasn't replaced that original Yahoo functionality with something better. Google is fast, easy and mediocre. Which is, I suppose, where things generally tend to end up anyway. But I still miss the original Yahoo index, before they utterly screwed it up with pay-for-your-listing-or-wait-forever.