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Comment by asolove | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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 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.

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.

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