
What’s Next for Delicious? - adambyrtek
http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-delicious.html
======
varworld
Original Text (since blog was down):

What’s Next for Delicious?

Many of you have read the news stories about Delicious that began appearing
yesterday. We’re genuinely sorry to have these stories appear with so little
context for our loyal users. While we can’t answer each of your questions
individually, we wanted to address what we can at this stage and we promise to
keep you posted as future plans get finalized.

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

\- No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there
is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for
Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where
it can be competitive.

What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

\- We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there
is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and
our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking
to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.

What if I want to get my bookmarks out of Delicious right away?

\- As noted above, there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious
and encourage you to keep using it. That said, we have export options if you
so choose. Additionally, many services provide the ability to import Delicious
links and tags. We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the
past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very
disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We’ll let you know
more as things develop.

~~~
jdp23
> Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this
> appeared in the press.

Speaking as a user, I am very disappointed not to see the team taking more
responsibility for the way Yahoo! is handling this.

~~~
bpm140
That's because "the team" was laid off on Tuesday.

------
bjonathan
This blog post claim to be destinate at the users of Delicious but it screams
all over it "IF YOU HAVE MONEY AND WANT TO BUY US, PLEASE REACH US BY MAIL".
Sad.

Hope, they sell it to Joshu or somebody who really cares

~~~
naner
I wouldn't mind if they sold it to Google. Google wants to be more "social"
and their own Google Bookmarks kind of sucks and has been neglected worse than
Delicious.

~~~
Macha
If Google won't run their integrated service, why would they care for
Delicious?

Or at least that's what I was thinking before the example of Google Videos and
YouTube came to me.

~~~
Naga
Well, in theory, delicious would come with its own team of people who are
interested in it, just like YouTube would have.

~~~
wyclif
Ideally, del.icio.us would come with this team of people:
<http://www.petefreitag.com/images/blog/delicious_office.jpg>

~~~
pgebhard
Haha, wow. Look at those chairs. So frugal!

------
mcfunley
Putting the entire team of people that knew how to operate it out on the
street was perhaps not the best strategy for getting a good price.

~~~
andreyf
Was it the original team that got acquired?

~~~
wyclif
No, it was this team:
<http://www.petefreitag.com/images/blog/delicious_office.jpg>

~~~
jasonkester
Off topic, but I love the $1,400 worth of monitors and $1.50 worth of chair at
those workstations.

Not sure whether that would send me running if I interviewed there.

~~~
wyclif
del.icio.us was a fairly early example of the lean startup.

------
steveklabnik
Is this too little, too late? Why wasn't this blog post made yesterday? Now
"Delicious is closing" has pretty much become "truth," even with this damage
control. Many have already started trying out alternate services.

Kinda scary how fast this happens...

~~~
theklub
I blame techcrunch

~~~
revorad
That's not fair. HN played a big part too.

~~~
loire280
Webdev celebs like Zeldman and Gruber helped fan the flames, too, by quickly
spreading the news over Twitter. I watched this unfold through my Twitter
feed; first I heard of it was a retweet from Zeldman.

------
zoomzoom
Google has a big opportunity here. Delicious is one of the best social search
products out there. Any real google innovation in social would be boosted by
the user data and brand. Not to mention the pr boost from saving them. Much as
many on HN and elsewhere are suggesting the viability of alternatives, few of
them seem to compare in terms of data and function right now. Not that this
couldn't change quickly.

~~~
batasrki
Totally agree that Google should snap it up. If any company needs it, it's
Google and passing this opportunity by would be a mistake on their part. Not
to mention that Delicious could be sold at a lower price since they've
announced that they've been put out and are looking for a company to buy them.

~~~
Isofarro
No! We are seeing time and time again that big companies acquiring sites that
are not directly relevant to their core businesses leave those acquisitions
floundering. Google has the same problems of acquisitions that have just
disappeared.

If delicious is to survive and flourish, then the organisation that should run
delicious should be an organisation that solely concentrates on running
delicious. Perhaps spinning it off as a separate business entity is the right
way.

Delicious has stagnated for far too long as it is. So either spin it out into
an independent business entity with fresh ideas and initiative, or replace it
with a federated platform to allow others to innovate on top of it.

~~~
zephyrfalcon
Hmm, Google's core competence is search. As many commenters pointed out
yesterday (in the big "Yahoo shutting down Delicious" thread), Delicious is
more than a place where people store their bookmarks; it can be used as a kind
of alternative search engine as well. So I think it wouldn't be a bad fit.
Also, Google has been trying to get "social" right, and this could be a part
of the puzzle.

------
varworld
"While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we
believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it
can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive."

I don't get how notepad, address book, calendar etc are part of yahoo's
strategy and bookmarks aren't.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
That quote strikes me as incredibly tone deaf. Not just the corporate speak of
'resourced' after laying off the team, but the utter lack of vision they have
for the product. Delicious defined a category of webservices (public
bookmarking) but to their eyes they aren't 'competitive'.

~~~
dasil003
Yeah it's really terrible. The part about "we have determined that there is
not a strategic fit at Yahoo" is laughable. I understand they can't just be
honest and say "we don't know how to use it", but the way they phrased it
conveys a sort of hubris that a company as poorly run as Yahoo should stay far
far away from.

------
paul
I want to make fun of the word "resourced", but can't decide how. Something
about lame corporate speak.

Now I'm off to resource the dog...

~~~
mambodog
Well I felt that way about 'evidenced', but that's pretty widely used now, so
look forward to _resourcing_ your dog for years to come.

------
MikeCapone
"Sorry, Internal Server Error."

Sadly, that's probably what's next for Delicious.

~~~
rufo
Yes, I thought this was a (somewhat cruel) joke as well when I got the error…

------
marcamillion
This is what I saw when I went to this link:

Sorry, Internal Server Error.

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to
complete your request.

I thought that was pretty clever by the OP. I assumed that he made up the url
'what's next for delicious' ensuring that it would go to an error page. But
then I realized that it really was an error and the blog post had been taken
down :(

------
javadi82
I find it very odd that Delicious was not a "strategic fit" at Yahoo!

If I remember right, Yahoo was a bunch of links pointing people to webpages.
How is that different from bookmarks?

Citation regarding the history of Yahoo:

Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of
favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations.

<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html>

------
gojomo
If Yahoo had just put 'Spinout/Sunset' atop that slide naming Del.icio.us,
rather than just 'Sunset', a lot of the anguish could have been avoided.

------
itsnotvalid
<http://blog.delicious.com/>

The blog has since only hosted two single web pages
(<http://blog.delicious.com/index.htm> and
[http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-
delici...](http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-
delicious.html))

I was already not very impressed that they were bought by yahoo years ago, as
I thought that yahoo! is not the right place to host (I used
<http://del.icio.us>, with the dots, since 2005). I was and am also a pro user
of <http://flickr.com> and wonder if my huge collection there would be wiped
clean in 2011.

Panic spreading.

Just a side note, I hate the "from yahoo!" part of the logo (on both sites).
Well, they should have done that much earlier, and I hope that some companies
with big muscles could save them. I really don't want to switch boat.

------
jleader
Note that they've pulled down all the other delicious blog posts; the source
for this page still has a "previous" link in the source to
'[http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/tags-return-to-the-
bo...](http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/tags-return-to-the-
bookmarklet.html), but it's gone, as are the rss and atom feeds, etc.

~~~
drgath
The static page was put up to handle the massive load hitting the blog.

------
ddrager
Yahoo has been lacking any major "must have" products in the past what, 10
years?

Here is a list of everything they offer: <http://everything.yahoo.com/>

Delicious was about the only thing that the 'tech' crowd uses. Think about the
people you know who might use Yahoo! Mail or Answers. It is the decidedly
less-tech people who use these products, mainly as a throwback to the Yahoo!
of 2000. Of course, Yahoo!'s goal isn't to cater to tech people, but people
who click on ads. I imagine their revenue is declining for even those main-
stream products, but for them to cut out the more tech oriented services which
actually have a chance in the future to really get 'big', is just delaying
their demise a year or 2.

~~~
delano
_Yahoo has been lacking any major "must have" products in the past what, 10
years?_

That's not quite true. They have a pretty good fantasy hockey pool.

~~~
commandar
Flickr?

~~~
delano
That would be interesting! But no, <http://hockey.fantasysports.yahoo.com/>

------
random42
Why would they do a press release, _before_ selling it? I dont remember anyone
ever putting a "For Sale" board, for a software property of Delicious' scale.

It is just they are covering up for the bad press, IMO.

------
pronoiac
It's up on the dev blog:

[http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/12/whats-
nex...](http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/12/whats-next-for-
delicious-cross-post/)

------
raphman
Just in case: <http://savedelicious.pommepause.com/> (collaborative crawling
of Delicious using a Chrome extension)

------
plusbryan
If I were in negotiations with Yahoo to buy one of their properties (and I
were more nefarious), I'd have leaked a story like this to reduce the sales
price.

------
dgrant
Anyone know a good alternative to Delicious?

~~~
wyclif
<http://www.pinboard.in/>

