Unconfirmed reports that Yahoo has sold Delicious for $5 Million+ | Hacker News Reader

Unconfirmed reports that Yahoo has sold Delicious for $5 Million+

thenextweb.com

108 pointsbarredo64 comments

I have been sticking with Delicious in the hope that Yahoo will sell it off to a good team, who can revive Delicious. Strange that no other company takes bookmarks seriously. Google Bookmarks is a joke - it doesn't even sync with Chrome.

I've been using a combination of Pinboard and XMarks. Overall extremely happy so far - Pinboard manages about a thousand and has tags and one-click "read later" and offline searching and is my primary backup, and XMarks keeps my dozen browsers and 500 bookmarks in sync transparently (stable + beta + dev + sometimes nightly versions of a number of browsers).

>Strange that no other company takes bookmarks seriously.

Cannot uparrow enough. Anyone care to shed some light on this?

Google Search killed bookmarks, it's faster and easier to simply Google a vague string you remember from the page, rather than type a tag into a different service, or trawl through six hundred sites you have incoherently organised.

That was true five years ago maybe, but these days Google is pretty much a cesspool. It often takes me over an hour just to find something vaguely related to what I'm looking for, even if I remember three or four different strings from the page.

Especially for things like academic journal articles, if you don't bookmark it then it's pretty much gone forever.

You would like http://historio.us/

It often takes me over an hour just to find something vaguely related to what I'm looking for, even if I remember three or four different strings from the page.

I find that hard to believe. Can you give me an example?

I saw a writeup of a journal article just a few months ago about how there is a lot of randomness in how academic grants are distributed. They basically created several different panels of the people who write the grants and gave them each the same proposals to review, and there was an enormous variance between the proposals each panel funded. I think this was for NSF grants, but I'm not sure. Anyway I can't for the life of me find either the writeup or the journal article.

Similarly, I heard a story on NPR about a research study that found the best predictor of how much 8th graders would earn as adults wasn't race, gender, IQ, grades, or anything else like that, but rather was how much they thought they would earn as adults. Can't for the life of me find that one either.

In fact there is an entire field of research that's disappeared. I know for a fact that there is a field that's basically scientists researching scientists/science, but I can't find more than a couple of the papers in this field or even the appropriate wikipedia articles.

For your latter query this research from December 2010 seems to be connected - http://www.princeton.edu/~angelh/Website/Studies/Article%201...

This connects uncertain career aspirations at age 16 to wage attainment at age 26.

Have you tried a Google Scholar search? That's what it's tailor-made for; I remember it having a few search quality issues when I was in college, but if I was looking for academic work, that was the first place I'd go.

AFAIK Scholar also doesn't push more often than once every couple of years, so you can be fairly sure it wasn't broken by a recent ranking change, and what you see now is what you would've gotten in 2005, modulo additional articles published.

Yes, I tried Google scholar and couldn't find what I was looking for. Maybe I've just outgrown Google?

A big one for me is recipes. I find a great peach cobbler recipe, but if I don't bookmark it, it is tough to find again. Because a search for peach cobbler recipe comes back with hundreds of pages, each page has tens of different links to peach cobbler reciples. And remembering things like, "butter,sugar" don't really help.

Before content farmer doomsday:

I would find a jQuery plugin that's actually small, useful, and without 100+ custom attributes. I love it and didn't bookmark it thinking that Google will give it back to me again.

Next time I search using the exact same keywords, I got: "Top 25 jQuery plugins blogspam you never heard about!"

Google failed to deliver THAT plugin that I searched before.

Care to try http://mybucket.co? When you found that precious article, it's a bookmarklet click away.

And tagging is not a chore at all, simple use #hashtag in the description.

Why should I use it over Firefox's native bookmarks?

I asked that question for myself, and the answer (for me) is because of the hassle of switching browsers.

I switch browsers somewhat often, and I'd like to have all my bookmarks in the same place (not to mention the terror of migrating all bookmarks when getting new laptop). That's the main reason.

And of course there are little reasons such as:

  * native bookmark doesn't give me preview or little snippet of what the link is about.

  * I want to replay Freddie Mercury songs on YouTube in loop.

  * It's always a pain to download photos of myself, tagged by family on Facebook.

Firefox sync means I don't have to worry about losing my bookmarks, and I doubt I'm going to use anything but Firefox for a long while. Your other points are interesting, but I don't really see how they beat the awesomebar integration Firefox has.

Firefox 4 + Sync (Slurp to get the bookmarks out of delicious). Additionally, use Dropbox or SugarSync to backup bookmarks folder. With 5 copies of backed up bookmarks, you'll be covered from all sides.

True, but I use Delicious for grouping things that I don't remember, so it saves me not a one-off search but an entire search session on a topic. Also, the graph aspect of seeing who else bookmarked a page, then what else they've bookmarked and tagged, is still a killer feature (if it weren't so slow) after all these years. Given how rarely I'm the first to add any page, for me Delicious is basically a database of everything interesting on the web. That just has to be valuable. If only some deep thinkers and hard workers would do something with it.

If you keep history, I've found Firefox's AwesomeBar is incredibly useful for finding stuff if you can remember a fragment of the page title or url.

Also, the Google Chrome bar is notably less useful for this. Chrome supplies completions assuming what you have typed is in the beginning of the URL, while Firefox searches within the URL, title, and so on.

My #1 use for bookmarks is to save particular page while researching a topic. I might do 20 searches with variations of terms, and find a useful page perhaps through a link on a page that came up in the search.

Then, a few days later when I need that page again, Google search is not going to help I'd have to recreate the exact query that led to me finding the site in question. That is why bookmarks are still useful.

People value things they already seen and know more than things they haven't. This is why bookmarking is always necessary. It is to aid recall.

Maybe because bookmarking is a bit like TODO apps: not technically difficult to do but everyone hates using someone else's system. Of course, Delicious was the exception :)

I use Chrome bookmarks and they sync to Google Docs... I'm not quite sure why they don't sync to Google Bookmarks. Nonetheless, I'm pleased with it as I'm on multiple systems and I still have my bookmarks built into my browser. Added bonus that when I start to "search" in the url/search bar, it brings up relevant bookmarks.

I swear by historio.us

And they might just get my subscription once I use up my last 70 or so free bookmark slots. The two best features are that you get a good search function, and it caches the page for you in case the original one falls off the net.

I joined Pinboard.in a while back and love it.

My problem with delicio.us was always the amount of time I had to devote to managing everything. I had to manage the links, the tags, my page, the plugins, etc... It's a wonderful service, but I always froze in that moment of bookmarking: what do I tag this? Where am I going to put this that I remember?

To that end, I've been trying historio.us. I'm not so sure about it, but I like that I just click one button and I know that if I really have to find it some day, I can. They killer feature that would make it truly useful is some sort of auto-filtering for what you're inputting.

I much prefer manual tags over automagical tags, as tags I create seem to resonate with my memory far better.

I just wish that delicious wasn't so exact when searching tags. For example, something a search for plugin would not match the tag plugins.

Is it really that hard to come up with some tags? Also, delicious auto-suggests tags for many pages, and the suggests are very accurate.

I have a trunk.ly account now, which auto-imports my delicious bookmarks and indexes the page content so I get a personal search engine of all my bookmarked pages.

Have you tried Favbot? http://www.favbot.com/ I like it a lot.

The Delicious plugin I'm using is suggesting tags for me, and it's pretty good. I have no idea if the web interface does it, as I only used it for searching.

If you like convenience, I think you will like http://mybucket.co

It operates and accessible via bookmarklet. Care to give it a try?

Oh, and tagging is as simple as #youruniquekeywords

"create bucket" gave me a 500. fortunately i want this enough that i will come back later today! edit: works now. two bookmarklets please! one thing that annoys me about trunkly and delicious is that i have to click twice to save: once on the bookmarklet, and once to save.

Didip replied to you but his reply is "dead." I think his first word might have caused his post to get caught by a filter so I've reposted what he said but changed that word.

>Didip said: [500 error solved]. I knew that 3am new feature addition is not a good idea =) UPDATE: yeah, two clicks bug me as well. The technical reason is that often times i want to bookmark a few images on that page. To do that (the most convenient way), is to save the image, onclick() event when the bookmarklet menu appears. Sorry, I'd love to have 1 click bookmarklet as well. If the UI makes sense, I'll make the simpler bookmarklet.

I'd love to. How do I get an invite?

Just visit the page and sign up using the create bucket form at the bottom =)

I know, it looks like beta email signup, but it's actually a real registration form.

To save RiderOfGiraffes a few moments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2313351

It's deleted now

Hmm what’s the story here?

RiderOfGiraffes: unofficial #1 flagger of duplicate submissions (a.k.a dupes).

I wonder who the "competitor" is that bought delicious.

The first one that comes to mind is Digg, since Kevin Rose said he would like to buy it and Yahoo contacted Digg if they would by it[1]. The second one that comes to my mind is StumbleUpon, especially two days after raising a Series B of $17 Million[2].

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/26/kevin-rose-yahoo-contacted-...

[2]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/09/stumbleupon-stumbles-onto-1...

I doubt Digg (the company) would bother. They are having more than enough trouble keeping their own ship afloat.

EDIT: then again, I wasn't aware of this: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/26/kevin-rose-yahoo-contacted-...

mahalo?

so having joshu and not selling in desperation is worth at least $13 million

It's funny that multi-billion-$ Yahoo seems more desperate than angel-funded joshu.

One day after we launch a new social bookmarking and community news site - http://www.rinnku.com - and Yahoo calls it quits!

The cowards... :)

good site there, good luck

seems the secret its to fake the traffic at the begging, let me know if you find out how ;)

I've been running social bookmarking service Faves.com for a couple of years. We had to cut our team as we were not making enough money to support it.

This year we've actually been cutting features to emphasize performance. I'd like to transition to a subscription model, myself. Prior to pinboard I wouldn't have thought that was an option.

StumbleUpon may be? They just raised 17M...and seem to enjoy buying stuff back.

Hm if they are really moving it, should probably make a more recent backup of my bookmarks just in case. Though I've not used the service much since word came down they are selling or sunsetting it.

Bad missteps at Yahoo!. Apparently they have a new faster e-mail. Yahoo email in Flash/Javascript + visual ads really ruined my experience with Yahoo.

I interested to know, how much is OPEX per month to keep afloat a consumer web service, like delicious?

I think it depends on how aggressive you want to be about spam fighting. The marginal cost of running delicious is not high for Yahoo (especially now that they fired the entire dev team), but you need someone to go in there and tidy up after the spammers.

Onion?

Why so under valuated?

What makes you think $5 million is undervalued?

Because., It is Delicious. If they made an internal bid between Digg, Reddit, Google & Bing. They could sell it between $15-20 million. Because., It is the #1 social bookmarking service.

hope the will use the old domain again, del.icio.us was so much better than delicious.com

How exactly was that a better domain? I always thought that part of the issue with delicious was that you couldn't easily tell someone about it.

"Del dot". "No, D-E-L, not Dell, it's not a Dell site". "DEL dot icio dot US". "Right, there is no www and no .com. It's just D E L dot I C I O dot U S. I don't know why they didn't use www or .com, maybe they wanted to seem hyper confusing to new users"

I kept mistyping it even when I was a semi-frequent user: del.icio.us, deli.cio.us, de.licio.us, del.ici.ous, etc. For some reason I kept doing the latter out of some sort of symmetry (3.3.3), even though obviously I know that .ous isn't a valid TLD. The even dot spacing is one reason I find cr.yp.to easier.

Now that it's 2011, I'd probably say, "Google 'delicious'."

Or bookmark it!

I want my browser to develop and improve the History feature so I don't have to rely on manual bookmarking. Strangely, no one is paying attention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com