Consternation uproar! The post-delicious world.
So! The latest news is that Sinking Ship Yahoo, who bought Delicious a while back, have now laid off the staff and are planning to torpedo the service. (For company at the bottom of the ocean? Perhaps.) Oh, yes, been there, done that. You must console yourself with the fat sacks of cash you got, assuming you got any. Somehow it's never really enough, because you love the software you make for people and you hate seeing it killed. Especially this must be so for Delicious's staff, because that was one well-liked, heavily-used product. Past tense.
Yeah, Yahoo is now waffling that they're going to sell it, but if so, they compromised its value in a big way by firing all its staff earlier this week. I'm betting it's sunk.
Possible new homes:
Pinboard: simple, has revenue model, api
Diigo: does more than bookmarks, in-flux api
Google Bookmarks: simple, unlikely to go away, no api
The decision was easy for me. Simple beats bloated. Last night I migrated
giles_watchers to Pinboard for newsletter automation pleasure. The advantage Pinboard has is that its api is Delicious's, exactly, so migration was nearly trivial. Nearly. I had to do a little hackage on a library I'm using. I will need to rewrite soon.
I'll probably just retire the delicious account for my fic links. I like my archive site better.
The real loss is the single-site searchable bookmark archive that Delicious had become for fandom. LJ is a horrible home for fanfiction because it's not searchable or indexable and a million other faults, but Delicious was a nice workaround. Now all that data is there in one place that's going away. Will fandom migrate its data? Will that data all end up in the same place? I bet not. That's a loss.
Sometimes software moves forward instead of backward department: I approve of the new AO3 "like" button, though I have no idea why they had to go all twee and call it a "kudos" button instead of the like button it so very obviously is. When there is already a word in screamingly common usage for an interface concept, you use that word for your implementation of it. Using anything else weakens your user experience.
Random: A font story. (No idea why it's in an image.)
Yeah, Yahoo is now waffling that they're going to sell it, but if so, they compromised its value in a big way by firing all its staff earlier this week. I'm betting it's sunk.
Possible new homes:
Pinboard: simple, has revenue model, api
Diigo: does more than bookmarks, in-flux api
Google Bookmarks: simple, unlikely to go away, no api
The decision was easy for me. Simple beats bloated. Last night I migrated
giles_watchers to Pinboard for newsletter automation pleasure. The advantage Pinboard has is that its api is Delicious's, exactly, so migration was nearly trivial. Nearly. I had to do a little hackage on a library I'm using. I will need to rewrite soon. I'll probably just retire the delicious account for my fic links. I like my archive site better.
The real loss is the single-site searchable bookmark archive that Delicious had become for fandom. LJ is a horrible home for fanfiction because it's not searchable or indexable and a million other faults, but Delicious was a nice workaround. Now all that data is there in one place that's going away. Will fandom migrate its data? Will that data all end up in the same place? I bet not. That's a loss.
Sometimes software moves forward instead of backward department: I approve of the new AO3 "like" button, though I have no idea why they had to go all twee and call it a "kudos" button instead of the like button it so very obviously is. When there is already a word in screamingly common usage for an interface concept, you use that word for your implementation of it. Using anything else weakens your user experience.
Random: A font story. (No idea why it's in an image.)
So far I really like it because it tells you which tags you've used before and I don't remember delicious doing that.
Would it be paranoid if I get a pinboard account too just as a backup? Possibly, might still do it though.
As for kudos, I can see why they didn't go with "like" for it. That's a Facebook thing in people's minds, so using it might have seemed too much like a knock-off. Also, would that have left them open for a lawsuit from Facebook? I can't imagine they can copyright a word like that, but you never know. Might have just been easier to steer clear.
It's fascinating in a painful way to watch Yahoo kill itself oh so slowly while deluding itself that it's going toe to toe with Google.
What's scary is that Yahoo is trying to recruit the husband from his start up. He's not biting, but they are being persistent.
Yahoo has been notorious for a while for being the place good ideas go to die. I was horrified when they bought Flickr. Not that Google would have been all that much better as a home, because stranger things than mere death happen to projects Google acquires. But still, Yahoo == simple death. I was hoping Microsoft would buy them back when acquisition talks were in progress, because man oh man, Yahoo is a poison pill of APOCALYPTIC destruction.
I can't imagine though that it won't get bought at all, unless Yahoo's expectations money-wise are unreasonably high. The question is whether it gets bought by someone who can make money off it. I don't know that there's a revenue model for delicious that doesn't involve a paywall even for existing users, and that's going to ruffle a lot of feathers too.
Never used it much myself. When the fuss started and other people started explaining what they used it for, I looked myself up. Man, that was depressing.
I'm always happy when a service I like offers me a way to give them some money for that service. Free things are things that might vanish. And their attitude toward their userbase shifts once money is involved.
Pinboard's extra-dollar service is kind of awesome for fandom, by the way. Full-text archive of bookmarked pages? Searchable? Yow. An awesome way to get an easy backup of fanfic you like.