Yahoo Trying To Sell Del.icio.us, Not To Shut It Down | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Trying To Sell Del.icio.us, Not To Shut It Down

techcrunch.com

42 pointsjordanmessina15 comments

Jeez, this is horrible blog spam. It doesn't matter that this is TechCrunch.

The number 1 article on HN right now links the original blogpost, and the comments cover the non-insight TC provides. The comments even copy/paste the original blog, if that's what you want. That seems to be the main service being provided by TC here.

Why are you upvoting this?

Flagged.

EDIT: I guess the Delicious blog is down. Maybe that justifies this?

I didn't realize someone had already put up the delicious post, and the blog was down so I figured since tc had quoted their entire post and added their 2 cents on it then it was HN worthy. I was going to delete when I realized the dup but there were already comments and I didn't want to throw those away. Sorry about the confusion.

The whole story could have been a deliberate leak by a Yahoo insider to drum up public support against shutting it down.

This would be more believable if not for the reports of the Delicious team being let go. While the site and IP do have value on their own, it's a large enough and complex enough site that there would be significant challenges with moving it to a new owner and migrating users off of Yahoo! authentication without the team there.

Yahoo PR single handedly gave the Pinboard guys a hockey stick growth.

http://twitter.com/PinboardIN/status/15562023131676672

Hasn't his sign-up free increased by two dollars (2,000 users) or more since the leak?

yes, it has.

Awesome. From their About page on their fee:

> The fee is based on the formula (number of users * $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay.

Bing's web cache shows the price being at (least, since we don't know when Bing took the cache) 6.87 yesterday (http://cl.ly/0A1N0K0C2Q2W2H0U3h43) and now it is at 8.35. That is a difference of 1.48, indicating a gain of (at least) 1,480 customers. Every user x signing up past the point that the cache was taken generates (6.87 + 0.001x). Thanks to Gauss, we can find the total revenue using (6.87+8.35)(1480/2), and we can calculate roughly that Pinboard made something on the order of $11k yesterday, and probably a bit more since they probably round up instead of charging tenths of cents. Sweet!

Hopefully this helps the guys over at Pinboard generate positive ROI for their time, since Pinboard is an awesome service.

"Umm, what? If they would have said all of this yesterday and been more responsive, then there ould not have been so much speculation."

True.

On the other hand, the fact that the entire story was ad rectum speculation is conspicuously not Yahoo's fault.

Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2017179

Definitely seems they had a change of heart in reaction to the bad press and decided to sell it instead of using it as a write-off

Best false alarm ever.

That little affair will surely have affected any valuation. It was just the shove I needed to move to pinboard. Let's start a conspiracy theory that it was a co-ordinated effort by some other bookmarking service to capture delicious users.

yeah, and if you want to sell a service, it's a great idea to fire the people running it...

switched over to pinboard already. I have little faith in yahoo now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com