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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."
Let's hope Yahoo will buy facebook next
This leaves a bad taste in my mouth
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.
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.
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.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Your bookmarks and data will be "safe" in the cloud.
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.
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?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
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.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.