AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
I'm sympathetic to the "real names only" terms that some services run under, but for a bookmark sharing service that policy provides no end-user value. This is a service I think you should pay money for, instead of allowing yourself to be the product the company is selling to others.
It's not like the new Delicious feels more tempting. I will also give Diigo a try this weekend.
I started typing out a long laundry list of issues, but it doesn't matter. Suffice it to say the new site is nearly unusable. There is nothing new that is useful for users or that would attract new users, nor is there any revenue model in sight.
I would be surprised if more than 10% of past delicious users stay with the site.
Last export I did was earlier this summer. I never imagined they'd screw up so bad. Now they don't even reply to my e-mails.
However, if export is broken/not going to work, that changes things a bit. While I do backup every few months, having no guarantee I can save future links almost invalidates the whole idea.
Now AVOS picks it up. Why would a startup pick it up? There is no way they can make a successful business out of the current state of the site.
But Delicious does have one thing: a big set of users and their bookmarks. Information.
It is obvious that AVOS was going to have to change the system enough to build a business model to experiment with. These changes are doing exactly that. They very well could be experimenting with the features, to see if their business model (hopefully there is one) works.
Now I agree with experimenting, I am EXTREMELY disappointed with the execution of it.
There are things that you just have to do right. Experimenting with features is fine, and since I get Delicious from free, I am willing to experiment. But if the site FAILS most of the time. That is unacceptable. I don't care if Eric Ries says "EXPERIMENT", use the "SCIENTIFIC METHOD". This is no excuse for doing a poor job with your tools and your subject of experimentation.
Unfortunately for them, and I do feel for them, I don't think the site will recover from this. The trust is gone. At least with me.
Now they don't even have a search engine now, they use bing. They say they are a content and media company, but I don't really use any of their services other than delicious and sometimes the email, and I don't know anybody who does.
I think when they bought Delicious, it was a great idea because the company had direction and Delicious made sense. Over the years they lost focus, and have been just wandering around. They don't make sense.
Where in the new Delicious does it actually ask for this? I moved my account over and haven't seen anywhere in the settings to even enter anything other than a username. Just curious, because I agree Delicious has changed for the worse, but don't like the vitriol and froth in this post, especially if it's wrong.
"Delicious is a bitter lesson for everyone. It’s the difference between how people actually use a product versus how rich, out-of-touch knuckleheads think people should be using that product, all to further their own self-interests."
Well said.
I can still save my bookmarks via the bookmarklet. I can still view my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/sciurus. The transition hasn't impacted me at all.
It's absolutely a complete joke. Do you want to separate your tags by comma??? WTF???
I've been over at the beta blog trying to get answers and judging by the amount of major issues, this does not look like a well planned release: http://deliciousengineering.blogspot.com/
If another similar service offered significantly more features or an otherwise better product I might be convinced to switch, but it would take a lot of convincing.
The other two products that come to mind as fitting in this category are Sublime Text and Balsamiq mockups. Both are great products, but are backed by even better companies / people.
In the offline world, I feel the same way about my (State Farm) insurance agent. His office has bent over backward when necessary to ensure things are taken care of.
Great customer service, honesty, and listening to the customer goes a long ways toward building a successful business. This is why Pinboard will thrive and profit while Delicious continues to sputter.
Also didn't like running Net::Delicious and watching it fail.
Or watching my Firefox Delicious plugin completely fail after years of solid everyday use.
Unfortunately, my import into Pinboard left me with incomplete link history, but I assume the dev will help me figure out why it didn't like my entire feed.
Not to be morbid, but using Pinboard is about as precarious a practice as using Magnolia was.
That rant about hosting already was a sign of trouble.
Pinboard rests on the shoulders of one developer, then the "hit by the bus" question becomes "hit by a tricycle" question.
How do you ensure longevity for a service like this?
So I decided to moved to https://pinboard.in/u:adulau
"Dear Delicious User, This is our final notice to let you know that Delicious is transitioning to a new owner, AVOS. To continue using Delicious, you must agree to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks and Delicious account information to AVOS by September 23, 2011. After your bookmarks and account information have been transferred, you will be subject to the AVOS terms of service and privacy policy."
Also, "stem to stem" should be "stem to stern" - I don't know why stuff like that bothers me so much, but it does.
They should have taken their time and gotten it right. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
Any recommendations for alternatives? (I've already checked Pinboard but it has a sign-up fee)
You can try Diigo or Zootool, though. They both seem pretty decent tools.
https://user:pass@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all
This worked just fine, as of Friday 02:43 CDT. Just substitute in your own username and password.
AVOS is ultimately at fault here. They didn't want to hurt the feelings of the Delicious old guard, so they made it sound like everything was ok. But everything -wasn't- ok with the product those users fell in love with, it was being obliterated. The best thing AVOS can do now is help users come to terms with the present reality.
Ultimately, the re-launch was the right move - the delicious of 2004 cant survive in today's web. But AVOS's communication around the transition just wasnt frank enough. They should have just held a funeral.
But I believe it is still a solution for a very persistent problem, and as long as it solves it, it will be able to survive very well in today's web.
The main problem is the fact that they are doing a crappy job at releasing. I don't think they planned this very well.
For those that haven't got around to using Delicious, can you summarize why?
The old delicious had all the features I ever wanted it for. When the "sunset" leak happened, I immediately set up accounts at pinboard and trunkly but continued to bookmark on delicious and let the others pull in from my delicious RSS feed.
Now that the RSS feed is gone, I will start bookmarking on pinboard directly. Pinboard was built to emulate the classic Delicious anyway, and has tag suggestions.
The missing feature is the equivalent of delicious.com/tag/whatever, where you would see a ranked-by-popularity list of URLs that were tagged "whatever". That was always an excellent fallback/discovery tool when I didn't get good search results on Google or a vertical search engine.
EDIT: delicious RSS is back, actually. I guess enough people emailed about it.
I was quite shocked about this condition when I read it.