
YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site - _pius
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/delicious-social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-founders/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&
======
programminggeek
"But Delicious remains a niche service, with roughly two million monthly
active users submitting links."

I think this is one more reason to not build consumer apps. You can get
millions of people to use something, but it still be considered "niche" or
"small" and not really make much money.

~~~
TillE
It's a reason not to make _free_ services. Two million is a huge user base if
they're all giving you $10/month.

Consumers are willing to pay for value received. I'd certainly pay for a good
solution to the mess that is bookmarks, something to complement Pocket.
Unfortunately del.icio.us was never quite there.

~~~
cantbecool
you're delusional if someone is going to pay $10 a month for bookmark
software. I could see in the realm of a dollar a month, not $10.

~~~
rokhayakebe
What a bookmark service for your work? Wouldn't companies pay $10/month for 3
users or $20/month for five users to have a repository of links/info + private
discussions?

~~~
edanm
We would and we probably do.

(Here's a lesson - business owners will often not even know what services
they're signed up to!).

------
mrbill
I read somewhere that Yahoo refused to sell delicious back to Joshua Schachter
when they were looking to ditch it.

I moved to pinboard.in when it came out and it's exactly what I need, nothing
more, and the guy who runs it keeps it simple. Really loved the sync to import
all my existing delicious bookmarks.

~~~
tomek_zemla
Yep... Rooting for the small guy! Hopefully pinboard.in gains some extra users
from this.

~~~
omilu
pinboard to the moon!

------
edj
For just straight up bookmarks, Pinboard.in is nearly perfect.

-Around $10 for a lifetime membership.

-Supports tags.

-Great search functionality.

-Bookmarklets for most browsers.

-Public or private bookmarks.

-Lightweight and fast.

I've been using it since 2010 and absolutely love it.

~~~
schnevets
I'm currently using Firefox Sync between work and home. There are some issues,
but mostly because I'm a compulsive bookmark hoarder. Except for cross-browser
support, is there any reason to switch from my current set-up?

~~~
tptacek
I use Pinboard to read cryptography papers and follow IETF security mailing
lists; it allows me to skim large amounts of material, spot anything that
might look useful, bookmark it quickly, and move on.

I have a browser search engine shortcut so that if I type "pin <something>"
into the URL bar, Pinboard will search all my bookmarks and tags and comments
and (apparently) full text of the things it's archived, including the full
text of PDFs.

So, if right now I wanted to find exactly the paper where Rogaway described
the powering-up mechanism in the XEX cipher, I can just type "pin rogaway
powering" and very quickly have the article in front of me.

I'm not sure how I would manage to do that with browser bookmarks.

I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard
useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with
bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search".

~~~
edj
_I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like
Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn 't (to me) have much to
do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search"._

Exactly. Pinboard is my personal record of everything online I find useful or
interesting enough to remember.

------
voltagex_
Ah crap.

This is a good time to remind everyone to use pinboard.in - the fee is one-
time and you can sync from del.icio.us.

~~~
a3n
I am a very happy pinboard user.

------
jlarocco
Do people still use Delicious? I thought everybody left after the horrendous
redesign...

In any case, Pinboard.in is all around better, so I guess the redesign had
it's upside.

~~~
AbhishekBiswal
Do people still use *Social bookmarking? Well, for most of the people using
the web, Facebook is the common source of news / links / any hot discussion
going on anywhere on the internet. Twitter too, but I have read somewhere that
generally, Facebook is the only source nowadays.

~~~
parktheredcar
What would HN, Reddit, etc be classified as if not social bookmarking?

~~~
twic
I certainly see Delicious and HN as being in the same landscape, but
different. Delicious has the concept of friends, so there is a social network
aspect to it. HN has comments, so there is a forum aspect to it.

I don't have many friends on Delicious, and no friends with really similar
interests, so the social network aspect is not worth much to me. HN has lots
of reasonably bright and knowledgeable users, so the comments are worth
something to me. It's the classic private vs public dichotomy in social
networks.

If Delicious could somehow mix in some of the forum aspect that HN has, it
could become enormously valuable to me. If it let me read and participate in
discussions like HN, but focused on the areas i am specifically interested in
(more Rust, less Bitcoin), it would replace HN in an instant.

------
tannerc
The announcement from Science is up: [http://science-
inc.com/about/blog/2014/05/08/welcome-delicio...](http://science-
inc.com/about/blog/2014/05/08/welcome-delicious-as-the-cornerstone-asset-of-
our-new-data-content-group/)

------
thehodge
Hmm all I get is the header and footer without any content, for those having a
similar issue, Google has it cached :
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Adealb...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Adealbook.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F05%2F08%2Fdelicious-
social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-
founders%2F&oq=cache%3Adealbook.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F05%2F08%2Fdelicious-
social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-
founders%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1647j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8)

~~~
achairapart
Same here. Although this ugly link seems to work:
[http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/delicious-social-
site...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/delicious-social-site-is-sold-
by-youtube-founders/?module=BlogPost-
Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Mergers%20&%20Acquisitions&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body)

------
josefresco
Delicious is from a different era. I don't know if you all remember, but it
was launched and influential when "social" powered sites (see Digg) were all
the rage.

The most powerful feature of Delicious for me was the /popular/ page, which
showed me at a quick glance what sites/pages were trending for that day.
Usually it reflected what was on the home page of Digg, and a few other
influential tech sites.

Moving forward, the idea of user generated content & socially powered websites
lost some steam (although the concept is still around) and Delicious lost it's
chance to make the site into a profitable force online.

~~~
buckbova
It predates reddit and digg. It had more in common with stumbleupon.

I used it for years to store and tag bookmarks so I could share them between
machines.

But I deleted my account soon after Yahoo took over.

------
rexreed
I've been a long time Delicious user, and I'm still a Delicious user. I used
to use the Firefox browser plugin until that stopped working. But I still
continue with Delicious. Why not? It does what I need it to do.

But now I feel like I just want a self-hosted version of what Delicious does.
I use my bookmarks for my own sake - I really don't care about sharing them
with others or discovering new links through Delicious. Should I self host or
is there a better option for me?

Time to download my links before they disappear, I think.

~~~
mhurron
> I use my bookmarks for my own sake - I really don't care about sharing them
> with others or discovering new links through Delicious.

That's me, I decided to write my own. One day I'll do it too.

~~~
rexreed
There's always these: [http://readwrite.com/2010/12/17/host-your-own-
delicious-alte...](http://readwrite.com/2010/12/17/host-your-own-delicious-
altern)

------
spinchange
In its day, Delicious was so great. I especially liked seeing what the rest of
my "network" was bookmarking publicly. The UI was no-frills and it was perfect
at that. As times changed, I moved on to pinboard.in then largely to storing
locally and using Xmarks, to now relying just on Chrome's sync across all
devices.

It's regrettable that Delicious didn't succeed in the hands Yahoo. At this
stage, the owners would probably be best trying to sell to someone or
something food-related.

------
izendejas
Pinterest is as good an execution of bookmarking (even if not thought about
this way) as I've seen. What sets it apart is that content is very visual,
organized by content and boards (directories) and easily discoverable. I
visited delicious again, and all I see are tags and page titles.

------
weslly
I moved to pinboard a couple of years ago and couldn't be happier with it.

------
etler
The didn't do a very good job during their tenure. As a user all I could tell
that they did was re-architect and redesign the site several times without
actually pushing the platform forward at all.

~~~
adrianhoward
They also did the ultimate sin - lost a bunch of my bookmarks in the transfer
from Yahoo. I had backups - so yay - but it meant I never trusted the service
again.

------
vdm
With diigo you can highlight the bits of the page that are actually
interesting, as well as tagging.

------
gmack
Pinboard.in + Delibar = done.

