> 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.
Even in the worst case you'd just buy another charger somewhere in the world, or plug into it a computer in a internet cafe or borrow someone else's.
I travelled to Honduras (from the U.K.) and realised after a few days I didn't have a charger for camera and then battery ran down. It's non standard and I couldn't find one anywhere. However, I noticed someone I met had a similar camera so I just borrowed her charger. In another situation (another trip) a friend's camera failed, but I had two cameras by then, I let her borrow one of mine with her memory card for the rest of the trip - problem solved.
Somehow, I don't think your story (or mine) has anything to do with dropping a business with millions of users, annoying lots of customers, with knock on effects for Flickr, upcomming etc. and losing trust with the early adopter community which are key to many new products succeeding.
However once we accept that delicious is going to close, the question remains, what happens to the data?
The publically available (non-private) bookmarks, tags and notes should continue to live. Perhaps a dataset could be made available in some way, eg via torrent?
Not intending to undermine your metaphor, more as an aside aimed at anyone who has just gone "ooo, I can pack one less adaptor", it's worth noting that in the UK the two USB / outlet adaptors are not the same and do not work together (based on iPhone 3GS and most recent model Kindle).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
That makes it all the more tragic. They hold so much potential to be a great technology company with such programming talent, but the executives constantly shy away from it, apparently searching for profits in less technical avenues. #2 in search? Better quit. #1 in bookmarking! Pull the plug. Yahoo even had the most visitors in the world at one time. And the millions of eyeballs are treated to vanilla news and email for a decade plus.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.