I Still Use Del.icio.us

I'm writing a quick blog post regarding Delicious and all the possible news and changes that are in the works for my favorite social bookmarking site. But I published a little soon. Please return later tonight for the finished post.

I've mentioned Delicious on my blog before. I've used the link sharing site for research, community and a number of extensible features in websites I build or maintain. Check out my latest bookmarks:

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In the middle of last week, a screenshot of a product roadmap was leaked from an internal all-hands meeting at Yahoo. As part of the slide, Delicious was listed among other services that they were planning to sunset. I saw the story posted first on TechCrunch. At first, it was just speculation and rumor but it was later confirmed. Also, there was some noise about the employee who leaked the photo being in trouble if they caught the culprit (*yawn* Get a clue, Yahoo! This is the more open 21^st Century.).

A number of blog posts circulated about it and eventually, the smart folks started compiling lists of alternatives (none of which excite me right now) and tutorials on how to export your bookmarks and migrate them. I made a note to come back and go through these steps resignedly.

There were several reasons cited for the shutdown. Yahoo is feeling the same economic strain everyone else is and recently laid off a large group of people. Speculation is that some of them may have been the entire Delicious team. Other speculation / commentary was that since the user forums on Delicious were so full of spam and lacking in usefulness, things were already really bad. It made me scratch my head, because I was not really aware there was a forum!

Then a day later, Yahoo / Delicious posted on their blog that indeed they are not shutting down the service, but will instead be selling it to someone else. In other words, my favorite free service was not (er, probably not) going away. At least, not today. I still backed up all 7000-plus bookmarks in one file here on my local hard drive just in case.

Ultimately, it's a free service so it could *poof* at any point and I'd have no one to complain to --except for you blog readers. So let that be a lesson to you. In fact, I'd suggest you read or skim this post on The Decline Of Web 2.0 and keep that in mind as you are updating your profiles and so forth out there. At one point long before Twitter / Facebook, MySpace was the place to be. Before that, AOL was the place to be. Before that, Usenet... well, you get the idea.