
Hey Yahoo, Can you please open source Delicious? - codybrown
https://web.archive.org/web/20110904025448/http://kommons.com/questions/401
======
simonw
joshu on Twitter: <http://twitter.com/joshu/status/15492062459731968>

"@cdixon open sourcing it would be an enormous pain in the ass. selling it not
as bad but yahoo infrastructure and auth problematic."

Besides that, open sourcing delicious wouldn't solve the problem - someone
still has to host it, and maintain it, and import several million people's
bookmark collections in to it. That takes significant time and money. Having
the code is just a small part of it.

A smarter thing to do would be to campaign for the (public) data to be
released as a huge data dump, ready for people to run their own analysis on
(an Amazon Public Data Set for example). This too has plenty of problems
though - under what terms should that data be licensed? People's bookmarks
belong to them - would they be happy with their contributions being released
as part of a massive data set for anyone (including sploggers) to do anything
they liked with it?

~~~
photon_off
I've taken a quarter of a million of the most popular bookmarks from thousands
of tags, and created a similarity search engine with it. Seems to be working
pretty well. Thank you, delicious.

~~~
hariis
is it available for public?

------
coverband
Why bother with the code? The value is with the existing links database, and
since it belongs to the users, Yahoo shouldn't have the right to sell or
distribute it freely.

Since users can already import/export their bookmarks, the only support Yahoo
needs to provide is keeping the import API open for a little longer after the
site is shut down. Of course this assumes that users would want to migrate
their data to a replacement service.

~~~
coderdude
Unless I am mistaken here (as far as copyright goes, if that's what you're
talking about) the only data Delicious' users can claim any right to is the
short descriptions they are able to add to each bookmark. The mere fact that
they liked that page is data that can be freely distributed.

~~~
encoderer
Nah, the tags themselves is what he was getting at. Not saying I agree or
disagree with him, but that's the value.

~~~
coderdude
I actually forgot that Delicious was all about tags. It's been a long time
since I visited the site.

------
thesethings
Google has open sourced: Jaiku, Etherpad, Wave among other things, before
closing them down.

Open sourcing it wouldn't solve the discovery/hosting part, but I still think
they should do it.

I'm sure it wouldn't be "easy," but it wouldn't be unprecedented.

Yahoo! folks also should take a look at dataliberation.org, for best practices
on getting on data out (also a Google joint).

(Nope, I don't work for Google :D, just think they've done some good things in
this space. )

~~~
rryan
Data liberation is different from open-sourcing. Delicious allows you to dump
every bit of metadata about your bookmarks either through their Data Export
menu or via their API. Yahoo! did fine with Delicious in terms of data
liberation. I imported all my bookmarks into pinboard.in without any trouble
at all.

~~~
thesethings
Definitely agree that data liberation is different that open source, I meant
to express them as two separate ideas. Maybe that didn't come across.

A bit of data I'd like to get out of delicious that i can't right now, is
social stuff/ relationship stuff. It really helped w/discovery.

Though you're totally right: link stuff is thorough.

------
kloncks
The actual code doesn't matter.

It's the tens of thousands of man hours that have been spent creating one of
the best indexes with careful tags for millions of pages. The data's what
makes Delicious matter.

And, if you open-source the data, I see people crying foul over privacy.

~~~
larrywright
Not if the links are public, which I suspect most people's are.

------
patio11
I'm pessimistic: it takes vastly more work to keep it alive, via either OSS or
selling, than to kill it. Nobody who Yahoo cares about will notice any news
related to Delicious, for fair or foul.

------
alexqgb
Since Yahoo! probably wants to avoid the embarrassment of seeing Delicious
flourish under different management, they're unlikely to change course here.

But having >1,000,000 people with freshly tagged and exported links in a
standard format seems to provide an opportunity to those who think they can do
better.

One request for whoever that is: can you add the 'sort my links by popularity'
feature that Yahoo! never developed?

------
initpy
This is not a copy of delicious, but I wrote this yesterday in a hurry.
<http://selficious.appspot.com> \- It imported my bookmarks and I use it to
manage them and my future ones (add, edit, delete). The code will of course be
opensource. I just need to clean it a lil' bit :)

~~~
initpy
All right, the code is online. I'm not really proud of it, but it seems to
work just fine. There are tons of features to add/fix and I hope that you'll
give a hand: <https://github.com/initpy/selficious>

------
revicon
For ppl who haven't exported their bookmarks yet, I wrote a quick webapp to
help (for the command line skittish)

<http://mattcrampton.com/delicious>

~~~
silentbicycle
For non-command-line-skittish people (on Unix), you can say something like

    
    
        wget --quiet --http-user=`head -n 1 ~/.deliciousrc` --http-passwd=`tail -n 1 ~/.deliciousrc` -O ~/docs/delicious.xml http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all
    

where ~/.deliciousrc is a text file with two lines:

    
    
       yourusername
       yourpassword
    

(or something similar with curl)

I run this out of cron nightly and back up my bookmarks in a git repo, along
with my other dotfiles. I really appreciate services like delicious, but _I
don't trust them._

I'm going to miss delicious's data set, though. Searching a really big link
collection with tags was great - I found a really good Ethiopian cookbook,
some good+obscure research papers, and lots of other stuff that way.

~~~
d0mine
Using curl:

    
    
      curl -n -o ~/docs/delicious.xml https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all
    

where `-n` flag forces curl to read ~/.netrc file:

    
    
      machine api.del.icio.us login yourusername password yourpassword

~~~
elementz3000
ok, so did anyone manage to get either the curl or the wget method working?

`curl <https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/recent`> works just fine.

`curl <https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all`> does not.

Maybe a server-side problem?

------
UsernameInvalid
There is an open source clone of Delicious, Scuttle:
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/>

------
illumen
I feel sorry for all the people let go just before xmas.

~~~
metageek
Weren't most of them moved to other jobs at Yahoo?

~~~
apgwoz
not the (reported) 4% of all Yahoo! employees that lost their jobs.

------
Andrenid
I doubt we'll see it open sourced, or saved in any form by Yahoo. It's too
much cost/effort for them, when that's the reason they're scrapping it in the
first place.

What i'd like to see is people quickly rolling out tools that help us get our
Delicious bookmarks into other sites easier. Eg into Google Bookmarks. That
currently requires you to install the Google Toolbar and import them through
that (ugh).

~~~
pjriot
You want a tool to do this job so you can avoid installing google toolbar? How
much do you reckon thats worth to you?

~~~
nmcfarl
I'd say a lot, because to do the import you have to swamp your firefox
bookmarks structure with your delicious one, and then import those using the
toolbar. Of course this looses all of the tags, and comments, which are pretty
much the whole point of delicious.

A system that actually gets all the data from delicious into google bookmarks
seems to be worth while.

~~~
kevko
I hacked together something a long time ago to do this with a bookmarklet.
It'll import delicious bookmarks into Google while preserving tags.

[http://blog.lifeslip.com/articles/2006/10/25/bookmarklet-
del...](http://blog.lifeslip.com/articles/2006/10/25/bookmarklet-delicious-
google-bookmarks)

~~~
nervechannel
That worked perfectly! I am hardly able to express how grateful I am :-)

It even worked more smoothly than the Google Toolbar's own importer, which
complains about dupes (wrongly), and prefixes all the labels with "Tag:" for
no good reason.

Will blog this ASAP.

------
codybrown
We are also compiling stories about present use cases of Delicious. If you are
a user, post them here and I'll update the question.

~~~
charliepark
Delicious was one of the best resources for finding articles on niche
interests, for surfacing articles that were especially good, and for finding
others interested in the same topics as you.

As for two specific examples: Learning Ruby on Rails has been a long, slow,
struggle for me. A number of reasons for that, but one of the main ones being
that I don't have many other programmers in my area that I can talk about it
with. Although there are scores of blogs and tutorials on Rails, it's hard to
know which articles are good, and nobody has the time to read them all. So if
I was looking for a post on, say, integrating jQuery with Rails, I could do a
quick search at <http://www.delicious.com/tag/rails+jquery>, and I'd find a
bunch of articles that had been selected by individuals, for their own use. It
was great for finding high-quality content.

Another example deals with niche interests. Delicious made it easy to suss out
_who_ is talking about $randominterest. Just by going to
<http://delicious.com/tag/randominterest>, you can see who else is bookmarking
it, who's writing about it, and so on. Especially when dealing with, say,
fringe programming languages, or uncommon design details, Delicious makes it
easy to find people.

~~~
stcredzero
_Delicious was one of the best resources for finding articles on niche
interests, for surfacing articles that were especially good, and for finding
others interested in the same topics as you._

I wonder if this could be implemented as an API of websites? (Or perhaps on
behalf of websites?) Instead of one single site, you'd have a p2p network of
sites using protocols similar to those used for digital cash schemes. Think: a
distributed open marketplace of middlemen. A sort of Diaspora middle tier.

------
bobds
I want Open Source Federated Delicious. Anyone wanna help make it?

~~~
jchrisa
Done and done: [http://blog.fupps.com/2010/05/25/truly-scrumptious-
bookmarks...](http://blog.fupps.com/2010/05/25/truly-scrumptious-bookmarks-in-
couchdb/)

~~~
kaerast
That looks pretty good, but it appears to have no concept of users. In which
case when you start replicating with somebody you end up with the same
editable list of bookmarks. That may be what you want, but I'd quite like to
be able to separate mine and theirs.

------
ahupp
Can anyone recommend a replacement for del.icio.us, ideally one that can
import my existing data?

~~~
hellweaver666
I'm a big fan of <http://pinboard.in>

------
Void_
Yep, open sourcing wouldn't help anyone. By the way, I think it's written in
PHP and Symfony framework.

This service just needs to stay alive.

------
ffffruit
Couldn't we do a service where delicious users can export all their bookmarks
(bar private ones if they want) and then send them onto a aggregator so a new
service can pick up where delicious left. I am assuming here that technically
delicious is not (very) challenging, its the data that is precious.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Delicious already provides an export mechanism. It is up to other services to
read that format.

<http://www.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export>

~~~
ffffruit
I know. What I meant was a service where you put your delicious username and
it automatically fetches all your data and merges them into one big dataset.
Something to keep the data aggregated and then re-launch.

------
withoutfriction
Why not try the Xmarks method? Seeing as a fair number of people are paying
for pinboard as a replacement, Yahoo could ask people to commit to paying $10
(outright or per year) to keep their delicious account.

------
code_duck
Is there anything particularly special about the code which would make it
interesting? The value seems to be in the concept, and then the content
produced by the large user base.

------
greenlblue
There are many alternate services of the same type. Just export your bookmarks
into the new service. I don't see what the fuss is about.

~~~
Vic-nyc
Care to provide a few examples?

~~~
greenlblue
Diigo.

~~~
mfukar
Notify the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. The word 'many' has been
redefined to mean 'one'.

~~~
greenlblue
'Few' can mean one or more so logically you got nothing. Although if you look
up 'troll' you will find 'mfukar'.

~~~
mfukar
You wrote 'many'. Provided 'one'. Now go away.

------
adrianbye
why not hand the data over to DMOZ to take care of

------
jlft
The most valueable assets are its data and brand. I would be suprised if there
weren't already similar open source services.

------
known
There should a legislation. If company stops _support_ or goes _bust_ it
should open source the software.

~~~
metageek
Open sourcing proprietary software isn't necessarily easy. I was at Netscape
when we sanitized the codebase to release as Mozilla, and there was _plenty_
of third-party code that had to be left out. (That's part of why Mozilla was
so slow to get off the ground. That, and the fact that compiling Navigator was
always a pain in the donkey, even when you had the whole thing.)

------
nl
Pfft. The code is pretty worthless without Yahoo's infrastructure.

More interestingly, I wonder how much Yahoo would sell it for?

~~~
joshu
yahoo doesn't actually have much infrastructure that delicious relies on. the
main bit is the text indexer.

~~~
nl
That makes the question of how much they'd sell it for even more interesting.

------
zeeg
Hey Yahoo, or anyone else, please build an open source app so it loses all
monetary value.

------
jamespitts
...but only the earlier perl code base :)

------
johndbritton
Donate it to the Mozilla Foundation.

------
vahidR
very good suggestion ...

