What’s Next for Delicious?
blog.delicious.com
blog.delicious.com
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.
Speaking as a user, I am very disappointed not to see the team taking more responsibility for the way Yahoo! is handling this.
Hope, they sell it to Joshu or somebody who really cares
Or at least that's what I was thinking before the example of Google Videos and YouTube came to me.
You can subscribe to bookmarks from other people (only if you already know their logins) and you can send bookmarks to others (using a weird for:nick meta-tag). Both features seem a bit sketchy by today's standards. This was definitely a breakthrough when Delicious was launched, but nowadays people expect more from a social site.
Not that I care about social features. I didn't miss them in Delicious, and I don't miss them in Pinboard. But it just doesn't sound convincing to brand Delicious as a great social product for Google to acquire.
Not sure whether that would send me running if I interviewed there.
Kinda scary how fast this happens...
I'd disagree. As soon as the story hit TechCrunch, they should have said something. Better to know one way or the other than to leave everyone speculate... because they'll assume the worst, as we've just seen.
So one employee in particular didn't arrive at the same conclusion about this leaked slide as the Yahoo PR department intended to convey, and leaked the slide to someone outside of Yahoo. That person also came away with a similar interpretation.
This does still point to one of the key mistakes Yahoo makes - it's inability to communicate clearly with it's own employees. And by masking these communication in PR-speak rather than plain clear English either suggest complete incompetance in communication, or a still unclear roadmap for Yahoo in general.
It was fair to assume "sunset" meant close down. Why would an employee of Yahoo leak a slide if it was clear that delicious would merely be sold, not closed down?
"sunset" in this context is a particularly poor choice of word. It has too many connotations of things going down. They could have said instead they intent to sell delicious - their employees do deserve clear and decisive leadership.
This is very much a leadership failure at Yahoo. They have failed to communicate effectively with the Sunnyvale staff who are still reeling after seeing their colleagues laid off.
Unfortunately, speaking as an ex-Yahoo, this is not new, nor surprising.
Fear, Uncertainty and (outright) Disinformation.
Because when you plan to sell part of a company, do you know what you don't do ? - you don't fire all the software engineers that run it.
Do you want to guess what Yahoo did ?
It smells very much like Yahoo came up with this selling idea in the last 24 hours.
> Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torr...
But regardless, novelty or nostalgia, the point is it's not very utilitarian. I think one can more easily expect a company to rip out things that people want for sentimental reasons, than something somebody currently find useful.
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.
edit: personally, a takeover by a passionate team would be much more satisfying then a shutdown, just trying to point out what I see as an opportunity for the big G.
I don't get how notepad, address book, calendar etc are part of yahoo's strategy and bookmarks aren't.
We should remember that "Yahoo is a content company". http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-is-focused-were-a-conte...
Because of that tight integration, I guess those features are tended to be used by certain coveted audiences of the My Yahoo product - like people monitoring their stock portfolios using My Yahoo. So there's enough of an ad-happy audience using those features to make componentising these features - perhaps as YAP modules - throughout the range of Yahoo sites.
Though, as I understood it, Yahoo notepad hasn't had any tender loving care for years (it was something I was interested in redeveloping during my time at Yahoo). It's not much more than a persistent textarea (unlike the defunct Google notebook that had far richer structure)
Now I'm off to resource the dog...
Sadly, that's probably what's next for Delicious.
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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 :(
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.
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...)
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.
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.
That's not quite true. They have a pretty good fantasy hockey pool.
It is just they are covering up for the bad press, IMO.
http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/12/whats-nex...