Delicious Bookmarks

Back in June, I posted about del.icio.us again and how the site was being mothballed. I spent a few hours looking at alternatives but didn't get very far. All the official announcements everywhere suggest that adding new bookmarks was blocked back in July and now the site is forever read-only with no ability to create new.*

It turns out that although that is the case for the official bookmarklet which loads a "Sorry" message if tried, that post URL was not the ONLY method available over the lifetime of the site. Older bookmark form URLs were different and one of them still works. I'm not sure if the new owner is unaware or if he just doesn't really care. My intuition tells me the situation is temporary, but here we are several months later and I'm still adding new bookmarks.

Some of my favorite features don't work. For instance, there was always an RSS feed of the various pages, but the entire subdomain for feeds appears to be down or inaccessible. This means that a lot of the automated accessories I'd set up around del.icio.us are defunct. For example, the reposting of my bookmarks to my wordpress blog via IFTTT stopped working and some of the topical RSS feeds I'd followed are unavailable. But the main feature -- a public repository of links that I collected, tagged, shared and curated -- continues to be there. A lot of the shared network features appear to be broken, so I can't see any of the other members that I was following.

Come to think of it, I therefore can't tell if I'm the only one that is still adding bookmarks. I'm probably jinxing things by mentioning it because there's always the slim chance the new site owner will get an alert about this very blog post. My apologies in advance if that's the case.

Delicious Alternatives

Eventually, I'll need to do something and move my bookmarking elsewhere. But I can't muster excitement about any of the choices I've found. My bias is probably clouding things. Let's see...

• There's Pinboard, which seems like the most obvious choice. Seems likely to have all of the same features, several new ones and a viable profit model. The price of $11 / year is super reasonable.
• Diigo exists and I even used it as a direct backup from Delicious for a while (via IFTTT). Comparably, it's a little bit more modern and slicker interface, which isn't really a draw for me but whatever. Also seems a little more corporate and has a higher price tag of $40 / year.
• Google Bookmarks is still around, but let's draw a big question mark around that one.
• There's Are.na, which seems to be a combo of the social bookmarking of Delicious plus the automation tools of IFTTT. They must be new and small, because I can't find much about them other than their site. Basic version is free, with premium add-ons.
• There are some open-source self-hosted alternatives to Delicious, but I haven't tried any of them out yet.

There are others, but the main reason I haven't pursued one and moved on is that the old one still works. Eh, it will happen one of these days.

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* There was a whisper of an impending announcement posted on Twitter back in August about the long-term future of Delicious offering "free bookmarking to K-12 teachers worldwide" but from what I can tell there was no follow-up.