Delicious.com loses its holy grail | Hacker News Reader

Delicious.com loses its holy grail

briancray.com

29 pointsbriancray26 comments

Delicious.com has lost value to publishers. Why promote it on your blog at all?

I just realized that:

A) I don't even use delicious for anything but storage, basically; it's where I keep most of my browser bookmarks, via a plugin in my browser.

B) If delicious isn't making money hand over fist, it may not survive more than a couple more years.

I need to back up my delicious bookmarks, post-haste.

There was that other bookmarking service whose DB got corrupted a few months back. Backing up is always a good idea.

I've grown to depend on Delicious bookmarks too much, since I work from multiple locations.

That said, I use the front page of Delicious maybe a couple of times a year, tops.

I have never, to my knowledge, been on the Delicious front page. However, they're the only social bookmarking I have ever had success with. Slap that beautiful, beautiful Delicious button which says "X people have saved this" (social proof!) on a meaty reference article aimed at geeks and you'll get a long-tail stream of tech-oriented linkerati visiting that page for years, rather than the typical big-one-minute-gone-the-next tidal wave of ADHD chipmunks hopped up on crystal meth.

This has resulted in a few of my reference articles getting more than enough links to justify the pixels.

Did you custom code that with the API?

I did a bit of searching but haven't come across a way to add a "save with delicious" type link that shows how many people already have.

Not from delicious nor from anyone else, except as part of one of those big "add a grid of 100 social networks in a big popup when someone clicks share" buttons.

Yea those big popups are annoying! The only good one is AddToAny.com, which looks at the user's history to only show the ones that the user has visited. :)

For the details of an individual bookmark, see the API http://delicious.com/help/api and look for this headline: https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get?

Hey Brian, Pat from AddToAny. Even without the drop-down menu (which displays the Delicious saves count) I love your implementation. If Delicious can stay relevant we should totally add the # of saves to the share/bookmark landing page as well.

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See: http://delicious.com/help/tagometer

In particular, I use the one which includes http://static.delicious.com/js/blogbadge.js

Delicious is one of the Web's most under-rated services. I've been a heavy Delicious user since 2004 and it's invaluable to me. Not just to store bookmarks but to find stuff I didn't bookmark that I just remembered about.

For example, let's say I remember seeing a site about an awesome new WordPress theme a few weeks ago. I can go to http://del.icio.us/popular/themes and chances are I'll find it. If not, I can go through the tag pages (say, http://delicious.com/tag/wordpress+themes) until I find it. Google does not even compare when it comes to finding content in this way.

Even if I backed up my Delicious account and hosted it myself somehow, it still wouldn't have as much value as it does when combined with 100,000+ other people's links.

Agreed. From a bookmarker's perspective, I love /popular/tag filtering

The /popular/tag algorithm is busted now, and regularly coughs up very obvious stuff (python.org for tag python, iirc.)

I wish they hadn't messed with my algorithms so much.

Agreed. I enjoyed that delicious.com was a place I could find articles related to a subject, not the site itself (if that makes sense).

delicious.com is not a stitch of what it was.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to support tag unions anymore. I know it didn't for a long time when you were running it too, but then when it did, it was an awesome way to find things based on topic.

What is up with those crazy guys that took over Delicious at Yahoo!?

Not only do I not want Delicious to be a Tweetmeme clone, but the front page has a two column layout with an empty second column unless you switch away from the fresh tab... what?

Tweetmeme clone is exactly what it has become!

This article is garbage. Delicious is not Digg and it's not Reddit and if you're only using it to boost traffic to your site - you have no fucking clue what this service is actually about.

lol. Did you read the article? It's from a publisher's perspective, not a bookmarker's.

Just FYI: Neither Digg nor Reddit are only used to boost traffic either. Apparently social media marketing is off your radar.

You ask: "So why promote delicious bookmarking at all!?"

Well, it seems to me that you should spend more time asking yourself how to serve your visitors rather than how to serve yourself.

The reason so much of the internet sucks is because publishers spend too much time trying to get people on their site by doing SEO and all that crap, then they crowd up the best parts of their website with obtrusive ads (a bit like the ad bar right above your articles).

Instead of all that, just focus on creating good content. I'm not trying to be mean, that just makes a better internet for all of us.

On my blog I explore everything that has to do with designing, developing, and marketing websites. Internet marketing is an important part of an effective website.

Regarding your implication that I don't address the user's needs, one of my blog's primary topics is user experience design. Under that you'll find such posts as "Online community best practices: Reward your top users," "Web form usability: Better form submission feedback with jQuery," and "3 eye tracking studies that influenced my latest redesign." So to imply that I'm not concerned about what my users want or creating good content, you've been mislead.

Good content is important. And so is finding audiences for that good content. You need both. Good content and good traffic.

Good traffic is not the same as exploiting sources of traffic. That's actually called spamming.

There's a lot of code in delicious (or at least there was) to prevent that sort of gaming.

Would you say that every blog that promotes delicious bookmarking is spamming? That's what I see you implying. If so, you are implicating nearly every popular blog that exists today.

The main reason to save things to delicious is for memory. Sharing is secondary. And getting on the front page or popular were a distant third.

So stuff that goes beyond "please bookmark us" - that's what those buttons do - seems dangerous to me. Especially since actual users have the extension or bookmarklets installed and do not need the site buttons.

I'd seen an enormous amount of shady behavior in and around this so perhaps I am oversensitive. At one point I was spending half my day, every day, dealing with spam on delicious.

"The main reason to save things to delicious is for memory. Sharing is secondary. And getting on the front page or popular were a distant third."

I think the first and second reasons apply to bookmarkers, and the third applies to publishers. For publishers, the primary reason is the front page IMHO.

"So stuff that goes beyond "please bookmark us" - that's what those buttons do - seems dangerous to me. Especially since actual users have the extension or bookmarklets installed and do not need the site buttons."

I can understand this sensitivity. If you look on my blog, I have a simple link that says "bookmark everywhere." But my popular delicious content is no longer rewarded with a front page link.

"I'd seen an enormous amount of shady behavior in and around this so perhaps I am oversensitive. At one point I was spending half my day, every day, dealing with spam on delicious."

Spam sucks hardcore ass. What else can I say?

I don't see how you can seriously argue this. You have 10 submissions to Hacker News, and all 10 of them are to your own website.

Argue what? I'm not denying that I use social media as part of my inbound marketing strategy. But I engage with the people that comment. Besides, I spend my time writing what I feel are important blog entries. I'd say I do my part for the community I'm a part of.

Getting people to promote something beyond what they would do on their own is, IMO, problematic.

I agree that the front page is useless. But it always was, now it's just bizarrely Twitter-oriented uselessness.

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