
Yahoo Just Pissed Off The One Group They Shouldn’t With Delicious Closure - andre3k1
http://www.centernetworks.com/yahoo-delicious-closure
======
lionhearted
> I’d love to learn what it actually cost to run Delicious. I just can’t
> imagine that it was a huge expense.

An analogy.

I travel a lot, sometimes "living on the road" for quite a while at a time.
It's a marvelous life.

I _carefully_ consider what I pack. Every little thing takes space and weight,
which means less space/weight for something else.

A friend of mine was with me when I was doing some packing, and I was looking
at my Kindle charger and iPhone charger. Both of the USB plugs can plug into
an adapter so it can plug into a power outlet.

Turns out, Kindle and iPhone USB-to-outlet adapter are the same, and it works
for both devices. I tested it, and then was weighing them and trying to size
up their durability to choose which one to keep.

My friend said, "Why not keep both? They're small, and maybe there'll be
problems later if you don't have both..."

And you know what? He's right. I could totally make the judgmental call to
keep both of them, and it'd make no real difference on my space/weight. The
problem is, there's 10-15 other little things I have to make the same judgment
call on, and it adds up fast.

Sometimes you have to cut, even if this particular cut doesn't mean anything
significant, because making 10-15 cuts really does add up to something
significant.

This doesn't make Yahoo's decision here a good call or a bad call. But it's
something to think about when anyone says "This one isn't too
[expensive/heavy/big/cumbersome/time-intensive]" - no, maybe not, but little
costs can add up fast.

~~~
bonaldi
In this case, though, it's more like you were weighing it up and decided to
keep both adapters, but throw away the Kindle.

Delicious is not equivalent to Yahoo! Notepad or the other crud they decided
to keep.

------
ostso
This title is designed to get people to click it (to discover what "The One
Group" is), rather than to be informative. Please add e.g. ": Developers" to
the end of it, so that people can click on it only if they actually want to
read the article.

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kgrin
Actually, Yahoo has been a pretty developer-friendly company - for a while the
geocoding service had less restrictive TOS than Google's; Pipes is pretty
nifty; YUI, while a bit too verbose for my taste, is very well-designed; and
of course, Douglas Crockford, the father of JSON, works at Yahoo.

This doesn't obviate OP's point - that closing a bunch of services makes
developers less inclined to build on your platform. But I'm not sold on the
idea that this will irrevocably alienate developers.

Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still
jump on cue if the platform is good enough.

~~~
dannyr
"Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still
jump on cue if the platform is good enough."

It's not about being good. If it is, developers would be all over the WebOS
platform. It's because the App Store still generates the most revenue for most
developers.

~~~
chrisaycock
Right, it's the distribution. Desktop developers have been willing to shell-
out a lot for Visual Studio because they needed to build Windows applications
for wide adoption.

------
petercooper
_Yahoo just pissed off the one group they shouldn’t have. That group?
Developers._

As despairing as I am of Delicious's demise, I can't go along with this. Yahoo
hasn't been a developer focused company in the last couple of years, even
technologies like Pipes have progressed little.

Yahoo is a media company. They sell advertising. They cater to the masses.
They're an AOL. If I were in charge, ditching everything not related to being
a mass media company would probably get the chop too. Yahoo is no oasis for
developers in my eyes.

~~~
Isofarro
The audience for delicious is quite different to the audience that provides
the most eyeballs and clicks that power the actual revenue generation at
Yahoo.

So pissing off delicious users won't have any serious financial repercussions.
And since it seems plainly evident that Yahoo are now hunkering down in pure
survival mode with soccer-mom content plays, it's unlikely Yahoo will need the
support of early adopters for the rest of it's shortened lifespan.

Delicious users are mostly using the eco-system of tools rather than the
website itself, so there's not much to be gained by splattering it with ads.
The only time I see the delicious site these days is when there's a link in my
inbox from a contact - and that's edge case for the vast majority of delicious
users.

------
chrisaycock
> And now I wonder if any developer will want to work with Yahoo when they
> know that services in their area might be closed at any time.

The OP was talking about why Google is more developer friendly but seems to
have totally forgotten Wave, Jaiku, etc. This article is just poor
generalizations.

------
PanosJee
A friend of mine has created <http://historio.us> I ve started using it 2
months back and never looked back. The founder is also a member of HN. Search
for stavroskor

------
axod
tl;dr Article believes Yahoo should pander to unprofitable developers.

Yahoo think they should concentrate on the non developer types that click on
adverts.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Of course, to be fair, the OP suggests that by pandering to developers who
might choose to use their APIs, Yahoo could end up attracting more of the
advert-clicking people in the end.

------
jwatzman
And they have perhaps pissed off another extremely important group -- the
smart engineers that they want to come work for them. They probably haven't
done it as badly as Oracle has recently, but if they keep this up it's gonna
hurt.

------
niels_olson
Luckily Xmarks backs up my delicious bookmarks. Oh, wait, Xmarks is going
away. Oh, wait, Lastpass bought xmarks. Whew. Now all I loose is the tags. And
the community. Oh, wait, that's what I really wanted anyway. Hmmmm....
Del.icio.us as fee-for-service anyone? Couldn't yahoo spin this off to an
investor who wants to take it in that direction?

~~~
gaustin
I would pay for del.icio.us.

If I were in the Bay Area or NYC, I would try to find an investor and wrangle
a deal to buy the service from Yahoo and run it in such a way. I seriously
hope that someone else is doing so.

------
vchien
I think they should at least consider selling it or focusing on promoting its
API to allow developers to develop better/cool stuff.

Btw, a post regarding its competitor
<http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2014670>

------
alizaki
did anybody else read this and think, Anonymous?

------
NHQ
Seriously. Yahoo is a platform for people who semi-professional homem makers
in the 90's. Delicious is one of their properties that is not like all the
rest. Their bridge to the literate web!

~~~
alexqgb
Kids, remember - don't drink and type.

