YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo

avos.com

573 pointsChrisArchitect118 comments

Please don't get me wrong, but I never understood what "social" bookmarking is useful for. As long as my supposed ignorance persists, I'm sorry to crash the party with a simple question: why is Delicious relevant?

Assuming many or most here think it is relevant, it should be possible to respond to my question reasonably, without buzzwords and with only moderate downvoting.

I used to use del.icio.us as a sort of online magazine. I would read the feed for posts tagged "python" and see all the blog posts about Python that people were reading that day. My usage was very similar to the way people use Twitter and Hacker News today.

Now there's an idea for an iPad app, along the lines of Flipboard and News.me but using delicious bookmarks.

It's funny, I started to write a reply explaining my love of Delicious. But the more I articulated the reasons, the more I realized I loved what it was, and don't really use it anymore.

1. Before browsers could sync my bookmarks across multiple computers, posting them to delicious was the best way to have access to them anywhere.

2. Before instapaper let me save articles to read later, Delicious was a great way to have a tagged backlog of things to explore whenever I have freetime.

3. Before Twitter, the best way to know what your favorite developers or designers were thinking about was to follow what they were bookmarking on Delicious.

4. Before HN, looking at the usage of tags and stories per tag helped me figure out what technologies or topics were growing in popularity and find out what to read first about them.

well, your post is separated into 4 different sources. my guess is delicious isn't going to be acquired and left alone but instead improved upon by integrating and improving upon your 4 delicious replacements

There's something to be said about focusing on one thing and doing it well. (Not to say Delicious didn't do any/all of those well.)

"Not to say Delicious didn't do any/all of those well." Then what exactly _are_ you saying? :-)

I think he's saying that the 'focusing on one thing' part is important. Regardless of how well you do a task, if you offer many services, you might not come to be associated as strongly with a particular task in the consumer's mind. Thus, when they come to think of that function, specialists come to mind rather than the you, the generalist.

That's how the theory goes, anyway.

I think because Yahoo did not keep updating delicious that these other serves took hold of each of the niches out of delicious. While each of the other services that you mention has their own strengths, I miss having the ability to tag something with multiple tags to better sort things into different categories.

I find this post really interesting. I've been thinking about this space and those 4 particular use cases for some time now and my co-founders and I started a company - The Shared Web - to make a product to tackle the last 2 cases in particular. We built a service where you subscribe to the topics you care about and get content shared from the people you trust. We show you content that is popular from the whole community but emphasize content from the people that you "follow". Would love to have you try it out at www.thesharedweb.com and let me know what you think.

I think it's mostly useful to keep track of all of the interesting stuff you've found on the web, so you can quickly find "that interesting article you remember reading about the javascript 'this' keyword" without searching the entire internet.

The social part is, I think, less interesting but occasionally handy (ex. here are all the interesting things I've read about javascript recently: http://www.delicious.com/tlianza/javascript ) and I think the aggregated data could be interesting, but as Digg's woes have shown, it's proven challenging to make a compelling experience around it.

You can see trending links relating to you interests for example. You can also find interesting link collections from people with shared interests.

I'm an extroverted hoarder. The only way I can close a tab in my browser is by saving it forever and broadcasting it to the entire internet.

Only half joking, I have 134 tabs open.

People like to be building something. Delicious is less edited than the wikipedia but it's still a massive datastore, semantically tagged, and filtered by its users. And if Delicious would get off their cans (and it looks like they will) it could be the single best way to share a link.

the community is why I still go back however i joined because browser bookmarks were a pain, syncying them was a pain and having an RSS feed of our bookmarks instead of native within the app just made sense. The social aspect was just icing on the cake, and at the time (think Digg at it's height) social-everything was hot.

back to the community...

When I need to find a good link or resource related to the web design/developer market searching delicious shows me what other people have bookmarked. It's like Google but only results which have been liked by users, so much so that they wanted to save it for later.

I still think that's one of the most powerful aspects of this small-ish community. The problem lies when you scale it, as I have no interest in searching the bookmarks of the CNN/Facebook/YouTube crowd.

Kind of like why Digg was so great. In the beginning it was news submitted and voted on by geeks like me

My take is this: searching delicious for tags of my interests always turned up cool results I would never find in Google.

Example: I write software for, and have a strong interest in, professional photographers and I keep bookmarks of my favorite photographers for inspiration. Many of them were found via delicious.

Delicious predates all the social media hype and is probably better thought of as "Web 2.0" application. Basically, it's Flickr for URLs. It's just a dead simple way of saving and tagging URLs. The social aspect is more of an ancillary benefit, the idea being that when you get millions of people organizing links by tag, some interesting structures start to emerge...e.g. you can generate something like a tag cloud for the entire web.

If the above analysis sounds dated, that's because it is. Conceptually, Delicious is really an app straight out of 2006. But like Flickr, it's one of the handful that's worth having around in more or less original form.

The key to grokking Delicious btw is that it's not for "bookmarks" like the ones you probably have on your Bookmark Bar in Chrome right now. It's for articles or links of interest that you might want to reference later. Presumably there are other services that do or claim to do this better, but I have yet to find one that's stripped down to the same level of usefulness as Delicious.

That is exactly how I used it. I've since moved on to Pinboard in the great Yahoo! scare of '10 and am very happy there. One of my favorite features is emailing myself URLs from my iDevice.

I've never really cared what others are bookmarking, as I've found Google has traditionally been just as good as a big group of anonymous people at telling me what to look at.

Cross-link that with people I follow on Twitter and it might get interesting, though...

Thanks - that was a great description. After having missed it for the last umpteen years, I've created a Delicious account and have started using it.

The way Firefox currently works makes that redundant -- I don't have a menu or toolbar full of bookmarks, I just star pages I'm interested in so I can find them through the "awesomebar" later.

And of course it syncs across Firefox installs, including my Droid.

Exactly! As much I have tried to switch back to browser bookmarks, syncing and other social tools, nothing seems to do the job as well as Delicious. The browser integrations are very fast and the overall implementation is extremely simple.

I think I only use 20% of Delicious, but it is the 20% I love it for.

To me, Delicious is like a really organized attic or "backlog" of interesting stuff I found online and want to remember for later. It allows me to find things back because of the tags, but it doesn't take as much time as writing blog posts and I don't have to think about burdening my followers the way I have to with Twitter. I actually wrote about it a while back: https://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/614 (see comments)

I don't use the social features at all and I am really curious what direction Delicious will take under new management.

That's just about how I use delicious as well. I only wish the tag search would be improved. I don't want to search for book and books just because some of my posts might be tagged as book, while others are tagged as books. I'd also like a way to easily rename and merge tags.

Have you tried tag bundles? It's not great, but it solves part of the problem :)

It has helped me find things that all other services have failed, and I can get an idea of what it is / what category it is in before visiting the link.

I never used the social aspect much, but the public aspect is wonderful. It's a fantastic way to find related sites.

2 things -- (1) best way to keep your bookmarks organized, synced, available everywhere in any browser + (2) finding interesting links of other people.

(2) is very interesting because "rating" on Delicious is not a vanity contest (e.g. Facebook) and people aren't rating because they "agree" with an article (e.g. HN / Reddit).

Rating on Delicious is implicit, the action itself (bookmarking) serves another direct purpose to the user; people are bookmarking stuff when they want to return to that article -- much like how Google's ranking algorithm works. Yes, it could be gamed, but it's not a high-priority for spammers yet, and I still find Delicious to be a very low-noise source for interesting stuff (much, much more useful than HN; basically I come here for the comments only).

And as an example, searching for Ruby gives you plenty of tutorials in the very first results, searching for "Google" gives links to their interesting assets (like their Fonts directory) -- people are more unlikely to bookmark flames / yellow-journalism; as that pollutes their own database of links.

I saw a comment saying it's an app from 2006 -- well, if that's true, 2006 was a lot better than 2011.

I don't know what "social" has to do with it. It's a service that let's me save and archive my bookmarks online, with tags, fulltext searchable, with a long description, accessible from any system and browser and a number out-of-browser interfaces. And in the case of pinboard.in (which I switched to when all the delicious BS went on -- sorry guys, you lost this customer), including an archived version of the actual page, in case it ever goes down.

I've been using delicious (or similar) for at least five years. My first reaction when people ask about it is sort of the same reaction I feel when people say "I can't understand why anyone would want tabbed web browsing; can't you just open lots of browser windows?" :)

I use Delicious to bookmark useful pages I come across, then import those bookmarks into Google Bookmarks. This makes my bookmarks hits show up using regular Google Search. This is better than Google bookmarklets because it's easy to synchronize your bookmarks across multiple google accounts

An example usage is following popular feeds;

http://delicious.com/popular/biology http://delicious.com/popular/lisp http://delicious.com/popular/finance

To me, Delicious is more valuable than Facebook and Twitter. Social bookmarking lets us to extract information from the chaos.

Of course it's nice to have one's bookmarks organized and tagged, but the big benefit for me is seeing what stuff my friends have tagged as useful. I found so many quick references, interesting tutorials and guides for doing things I was interested in that it was far better than any social news aggregator could have been for me. The /popular page was also a news aggregator of sorts in its own right, except that it was searchable by topic and it skewed heavily towards links worth revisiting.

A couple of things lead me to gradually stop using delicious.

1) There was a horrible update for their FF plugin a couple of years back that essentially broke the way middle clicks worked (and the way I preferred to use it).

2) My friends stopped using it so much, and so it became gradually less useful for me as well. I still check out the /popular page for things I'm interested on occasion, but the utility from my friends bookmark feeds is almost gone.

Simple - it's better than google.

My primary use for google these days is searching sites, like this one and stackoverflow. If I want to find an unknown site based on a keyword, delicious guarantees me the best results most of the time.

"AVOS is a new Internet company, led by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. AVOS is located in San Mateo, California"

I'm surprised I hadn't heard of that company before. I thought these two were still working at YouTube. Are they?

"YouTube (…) which was acquired by Google 18 months later for $1.76B"

I was surprised of seeing that as well, since the price I have seen everywhere else was $1.65B. I guess they know that better than anyone else but why the difference?

I am just speculating here but my hunch would be that the value of Google stock exchanged could pose a difference between the time the deal was agreed upon, and the time at which the deal closed.

Perhaps additional payments were tied to hitting (or exceeding) certain targets?

Could be the result of an earn out.

Basically: deal is X, but if condition Y holds true for the next year, we'll given you an additional Z.

Must be someone who didn't know the difference between G$ and Gi$ (1024 vs. 1000)…

Oh come on, 1.76 G$ = 1.64 Gi$; they're remarkably close to the other values.

around 14 days ago I updated my browser to firefox 4, and all my delicious bookmarks that were in tag clouds on my deliciousbar disappeared - silently deleted. They weren't to be found anywhere, not in my tagcloud, not in my history not on delicious site. I e-mailed them but didn't get a reply, and now it seems I've lost years worth of bookmarks that were important to me.

I'll never use delicious again.

Google syncs all your bookmarks if you use Chrome. I've yet to lose any. Something to think about.

I kinda like firefox, but this might make me change to chrome though.

And welcome to hacker news :-)

Firefox 4 also has built-in sync (of bookmarks, history, and some configuration stuff if you like), so not the best reason to switch :P Go to Preferences->Sync to set it up.

(It requires both a password and a sync key because they store all your data encrypted. The sync key is used to decrypt it client-side.)

Chrome's bookmark sync is not foolproof yet -- I've never lost a bookmark, but I get dupes all the time (usually after renaming a bookmark: the old name comes back as a duplicate).

Very true, and don't bother to use xmarks with google chrome sync. It will keep on duplicating every time. Making multiple copy of the bookmarks.

Prior to 14 day ago, minmax could say the same thing about Delicious...

Yeah but what can I say, I'm a Google fanboy.

I can use pinboard (and similar) on any browser and any platform, including a simple API to do custom stuff, if I want. Much more portable.

Several months ago I lost bookmarks with Chrome sync. I think I did something weird, though, like go from developer-channel Chromium to stable Chrome.

How were you backing up your PC?

I think his comment was about losing trust in the relationship with his vendor, so the backup status of his computer is of course irrelevant. For example, if one of my vendors irrevocably lost my data and suggested it were my fault for not backing up, I would mirthlessly laugh at them (at the least).

Reminds me of a philosophical error I see folks make a lot. If a girl assures you she's taking birth control but is secretly not, you may wind up impregnating her. Perhaps you'll then complain to your grandmother about how cross you are with your girlfriend. If your grandmother responds, "Oh, that makes me so mad. It takes two to tango, you know!", she is quite wrong. In the scheme of all actors, you certainly bear a share of the responsibility for the situation you find yourself in, but just between you and your girlfriend, she's 100% wrong, and deserves every ounce of irritation.

Sure, but I think it depends on the vendor.

And when your vendor is a bunch of Yahoos that you aren't even paying......

You could say that about his analogy too... There's no financial relationship between you and your girlfriend so she bears no responsibility to tell you the truth about her birth control status. :P

The situation seems slightly different from this one. Computer users should backup data they consider valuable. delicious let's you easily export (and re-import) all bookmarks. If somebody never cared to export bookmarks data for years, then ... well.

Feel free to adapt this to your boy/girl/grandmother scenario.

I wasn't backing up my bookmarks because I trusted delicious. Lessons learned...

This isn't about trusting delicious or not. Simply backup your damn data.

revert your machine, maybe works.

mixmax, I coded some bash scripts to make easier to use delicious; http://github.com/azer/bookmarking-tools. Using dmenu (suckless.org) with these scripts, it's very comfortable to access bookmarks on desktop. I don't know the Firefox 4 way of executing a bash command but UZBL users can also bind a key like "b" to insert new bookmark to both a local file and to delicious.

I forgot to say, these scripts provide keeping bookmarks in a local file being synchronized with delicious

Are you sure the bookmarks are lost? The extension/addon for delicious isn't compatible with FF4. You can always fish the Google Reader cache for the feed of your bookmarks. Unless they're all private there should be a copy somewhere.

Every time I bookmark something using the FF plugin it gets saved to my Delicious.com account. I'm betting if you log in to your delicious account you'll see all of the bookmarks that are not showing on your browser currently.

The reason that they aren't showing on your browser is most likely because the Delicious plugin is not compatible with FF4. Their lack of FF4 support is a totally reasonable thing to criticize Delicious about. They must be severely under staffed to not have updated their plugin to be compatible with FF4.

(I've been running social bookmarking site, Faves.com, since 2005).

I still think there is a largely unmet need that fits into the "Social Bookmarking" niche. But I don't think "Social" is the best way to think about it.

As an avid user (of Faves.com, in my case) - I use it for (in order of importance):

    1. Pack Rat - I don't ever want to loose a link I
       found interesting enough to want to recall later.
    2. Personal Search - I need a great search interface
       to quickly find anything I've saved (search across
       tags, and comment text).

The unmet need - NOT "Social" in the sense that I want to share links with my "friends" - but, rather, topic-based "Communities". Help me interact with people who share the same interests. This is more in the vein of Hacker News or Reddit. But I don't have any one service (Faves, included) that do this "right" yet.

I think I want a well integrated system that spans:

    - Personal Bookmarking
    - Personal Knowledge Base w/ Search
    - Topic Forums
    - Commenting system
    - Micro-blogging/publishing

I agree. Back in the days before HN, I would often use Delicious as my aggregator of choice. I would follow specific tags (webdev, informatics, etc.) in my RSS reader and I would find amazing resources all the time. In retrospect, each tag could be similar to a subreddit, but with much higher quality links. These topic-based communities as you put it are much more interesting than, say, seeing what links my cousin shared on FB.

I just discovered this when I tried to bookmark something on Delicious. I am positively surprised that they actually asked me if I wanted to give my personal information to Avos. This is the way it should be.

One critical note though, I went to http://blog.delicious.com/ expecting to read about this, but there is nothing about the acquisition there. If this does not warrant a blog post, what is a blog for?

Looks like they just updated their blog.

I felt the same. the sheen vanished for me when the email contained the text:

"Originating IP address: 127.0.0.1"

oops!

yphp has a different function to get the remote address as the normal methods don't work since it is behind a load balancer and using ytunnel (modified stunnel for yahoo).

Guess they forgot to use the proper function :)

Probably a lot of historical users will never tick the box to allow their data to be transferred, and that data will fall off the web, or at best be archived. That would happen even if there was not a time limit for users to take action; June is likely the time limit. There has already been some work on scraping an archive of Delicious and that is going to pick up steam.

On the one hand, they seem to be doing things right with giving users control over their data, and complying with their ToS. Pity this means the data that got siloed away will be lost. Even when everyone does everything right, data silos are not good in the long term.

I've switched to Pinboard.in, and couldn't be happier. Still, great news for Delicious users!

Same here. Even though I was satisfied with Delicious, I wanted my bookmarks somewhere safe. Now the question arises: will Delicious write importers for all these other services so that I can move back?

Pinboard exports in delicious format, so you should be able to just re-import and be good to go.

Thanks for your great service; I'm seriously enjoying Pinboard. Can't imagine switching :)

cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome... and in case that goes, image: http://i.imgur.com/voNw9.png

Also, probably a better source here: http://blog.delicious.com/

thanks for this!

I believe Coral CDN (http://coralcdn.org/) is a superior way of surviving a front-page placement on HN. AFAIK, all page assets are cached with Coral, not just the page as GoogleBot sees it.

In this particular case it probably didn't matter as much, but for your consideration, anyway.

CoralCDN is far more superior. AKAIK, one its main main goals is to help survive front-page placements on popular sites. Its also far more easier to use. Since you mention it here is the CoralCDN for this article: http://www.avos.com.nyud.net/delicious-press-release/ . The only problem I find with CoralCDN is that if you try accessing a URL that is already down with CoralCDN and has not been cached by Coral it probably won't work. The Google cache would be far more effective in such a case.

Well, people have suggested an automatic CoralCDN feature to Hacker News.

That would be good.

Does anybody know if any Yahoo employees are going to AVOS at the same time? (Also, are there even any employees with full-time responsibilities on Delicious?) Is AVOS going to try to re-hire some of the old Del.icio.us team?

This is good news but I am thinking that things at Delicious might be a bit rocky as new admins adjust. If you're a happy Pinboard.IN user, or use some other service, it's not necessarily a reason to switch today.

Just filled out the opt-in form (https://secure.delicious.com/settings/optin). Can't wait to see what they do with it. Note to the new owners: if you charge, I'll gladly pay.

Is Delicious in good hands? There is no place like localhost: http://i.imgur.com/KGVzN.png (funny)

Did you notice Delicous in the subject?

Congrats!

I'm really happy to see this. I think sort of joshu buying the company back, this is one of the better possible outcomes for the future of the delicious community.

The URL leads to a 404, but the press release is at just http://avos.com

When the info leaked that Yahoo was thinking about dumping Delicious, I wrote a Chrome Webapp that lets one scrape bookmarks from Delicious, corresponding to lists of tags (any bookmark, not just your own).

It's still out there (and still works): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nbahmnpelbdcmkpllm...

Thanks for this! I use the built-in Chrome syncing now, but I never figured out how to grab some of my tagged bookmarks.

Tbey are building a search engine. This is data source of human proportions.

I have this pet hypothesis that matching delicious tags with actual words found on the web pages will make for a killer query expansion algorithm...

Which, you know, we hoped Yahoo! would do when I was there working on Delicious. Maybe these guys will figure it out.

How much did they pay for delicious?

Has anybody reviewed the terms & conditions, privacy policies etc. Is there anything in them to make me concerned that Avos will do anything with my data that I won't like above and beyond what the existing Delicious T&C were?

I presume these guys have taken over Delicious because they see it as a good business opportunity and I'd like to know that their opportunity isn't going to be at my expense.

I use it along with a team of people who tag stuff according to a particular taxonomy. My scripts pull a bunch of those tags out through the api and cache them on a local server where we can do whatever we like with them to show them to readers. It's a really good way to do collaborative editing or curating of new content. Anyway, I'm glad that it will be sticking around!

I'm all in for Delicious. I love it and support and want to see it alive and not rotting in Yahoo.

One thing I didn't understand though, is Joshua Schachter's reaction to the news by tweeting: "inbox asplode!" (https://twitter.com/joshu/status/63294731077160960)

Can someone explain?

Maybe a bunch of people emailed him after hearing the news?

hmm--it could be

I went from being an avid Delicious user to using Pinboard instead. I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens now, and hopefully there are so cool stuff coming that I'll go back to being a fanboy again. This is (hopefully) amazing news!

Apparently nobody reads the TOS, because clicking the TOS link leads to the press release.

Somebody installs wp-super-cache[0] in that poor dying Wordpress blog.

Glad to see delicious itself not dying.

[0] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Good for all delicious users.It's time to innovate the social bookmark again.

I used delicious years ago, but only for the bookmark syncing. I switched to foxmarks when it started, then eventually the built in sync of firefox and chrome. Never cared about the social aspect of it all.

Great News!!! As a long-time Delicious user, I'm glad to see that it will continue on. I'm looking forward to any enhancements, but hoping the core of the service does not change too much.

There is a way to install the old plugin in firefox 4. Look at the post by sergueybloom in this forum: http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID...

Good example to show every area of Internet needs innovation.

Bookmarking is as old as the first web browser. It's great that a great team is trying to save communities and innovate in this area.

I just used delicious last night for the first time in years and through weird linkage discovered angry video game nerd which I find to be one of the best web shows ever.

In case you are still looking for the other setups, do give http://Pinboard.com a spin. One time pay, but very nice.

That's GREAT news. Delicious is one of the web apps I can't live without. Hope the new company can update the firefox plugin such that I can upgrade to Firefox 4.

I wonder if they're hiring ... I would love to work on delicious, was about 6 months out from writing a bookmarking service for myself.

Does anyone know what their motivation of buying it ? I'm pretty sure they could write this in a weekend in python.

For notes and bookmarks I'm using thinkery.me, is there any reason why I should invest my time into Delicious?

hmph, this one caught me by surprise..... more infos: http://www.delicious.com/help/transition

I can finally delete my yahoo account.

How much did they pay?

just transfered my delicious a/c to AVOS

is Google buying Delicious next?

Dead.

The big question is ... How much did Yahoo get for the company ?

The following concerns me, from the privacy policy: "AVOS may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your Personal Information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy."

Not sure that I'm as excited as I could be since they didn't set up their webserver (avos.com) to handle the traffic this announcement was sure to generate.

"Error establishing a database connection" is not your friend.

I wouldn't expect them to set up a web server ( or more likely servers) completely capable of handling a significant chunk of the traffic to a major website, just to serve the blog of their currently unnotable company.

They have until July, where they start to run Delicious themselves to set up the infrastructure to handle that.

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