Goodbye Delicious

[httpwebwitch]

Among those products Yahoo is either killing or merging into other projects: Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, Altavista, and a few others blog [zeldman.com]

[techcrunch.com...]

For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that the Yahoo layoffs included the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out the above Yahoo! product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others. Listed under the ominous “Sunset” are: Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks

Delicious, MyBlogLog and Upcoming have been somewhat neglected since being acquired by Yahoo and founders Joshua Schachter, Marcoullier and Baio have all moved on to do other (more successful) things. Perhaps one tell tale sign of Delicious’ demise? The support forums are now riddled with spam and team sign-off missives like the one below.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:43 pm (utc) on Dec 17, 2010]
[edit reason] add source [/edit]

[incrediBILL]

Altavista should be a protected site with a big "Internet Historical Society" plaque nailed to the front of it.

The rest of them? adios, never used 'em, won't miss 'em

[Hugene]

What a mistake IMHO. Isn't Altavitsa just a domain and an HTML template on top of their SE (aka M$'s)?

Delicious is an amazing tool, I can't believe they are doing this. Someone's gotta be able to buy it and make money with it (G, FB, M$...?)

[PaulPA]

Altavista is not the only historical search site on the Yahoo's chopping block, AlltheWeb is another.

[albo]

So many years ago, at our office, Altavista WAS the port to the web...

[engine]

Sometimes, I wonder about these 'clever' people. They know how to ruin brands.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Delicious and MyBlogLog would be a major loss, to drop them or merge them doesn't make financial sense. Yahoo! should sell them or continue to support them imo. This move doesn't sound very bright.

[J_RaD]

altavista!?!?! my 1st search engine!

[digitalhorizonsuk]

This is a bad move by Yahoo! If they cannot handle these brilliant tools, they can sell those to others who can be benefited from them or it can make them an open source project so that the web community will take care of it.

[httpwebwitch]

yeah J_RaD, altavista was the first for most of us. 1995. According to Altavista lore, Yahoo never really wanted A-V, it was part of the deal when they purchased Overture, who had bought AltaVista earlier that year.

Aside from nostalgia, the AltaVista brand has no value. Searches from altavista.com go directly to search.yahoo.com, and the only thing that makes it branded as AltaVista is a variable in the querystring. And Yahoo Search is just Bing with a different interface.

Delicious on the other hand has all that clouded user data that really ought to find a new home.

[netmeg]

Nostalgic over Alta Vista but not surprised. It's like a foster child that's been kicked from pillar to post for years (DEC owned it at one time - DEC!)

Heartbroken over Delicious. Have used it for years, still use it every day. Wish someone would buy it.

[Hugene]

And they dropped Geocities too earlier this year.

To me Y has become the place where other sites go to die.

Delicious should really be kept, its a great tool.

[Demaestro]

it can make them an open source project so that the web community will take care of it.

Agreed! To just shut them off would be a waste.

[Angonasec]

I've personally never used "Yahoo! Bookmarks" but I see lots of their referrals in our site access logs, so plenty of our visitors must use the service.

Y! is still very popular in Asia.

But the Big Cheese-ess says they've got to pay their bills.

[Fotiman]

It turns out that Yahoo is actually going to try to "unload" Del.icio.us (aka "sell" it), vs. shut it down.

[techcrunch.com...]

- We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.

[skibum]

Pretty soon there isn't going to be anything left of Yahoo! It's basically just a name now. Seems like anything that requires any engineering or support is being cast off. Is there any way they can grow anything but maybe a temporary stock price boost going down the current path?

[iThink]

No other company on internet can match Yahoo when it comes to the art of murdering sites that were once leaders in their niche. Some of them like Altavista and Geocities were best known brands on the internet.

Some reports say that now a days Yahoo is busy tweaking its logo:

[businessinsider.com...]

May be that will help them stay alive.

[frontpage]

It's kind of amusing that AltaVista brands itself as this

AltaVista provides the most comprehensive search experience on the Web!

I doubt anyone under that age of 30 has ever heard of AltaVista.

[netmeg]

(Actually the joke being passed around on twitter today was that the surest way to shut down Wikileaks was to have Yahoo! buy it)

[keyplyr]

Also received an email from Y! announcing the end of their video service by March 2011.

[albo]

...so now Yahoo! claims that the rumors of the death of Delicious have been greatly exaggerated (or taken out of context by the press). Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand suggests that Yahoo! neglected to provide context out of which the rumors could have been taken: [is.gd...]

[yaix2]

altavista was the first for most of us.

When it was altavista.digital.com

[johnnie]

Oh no, not altavista :(

What's next? Hotbot?

[engine]

Delicious blog statement.

What's next for Delicious [blog.delicious.com]

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

- No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

[BillyS]

Don't blame Yahoo; they're just trying to survive. Cutting all of the support costs for these sites will give Yahoo another year or two of independence before the whole company is sold off.

It will be interesting to see what they do with their directory. I'm thinking it will be sold to Microsoft and they will remove all of the "free" listings.

[Wlauzon]

..or it can make them an open source project so that the web community will take care of it...

And end up like DMOZ, another of those forgotten stepchildren that nobody cares about anymore? Though DMOZ is still owned by AOL, it would be the same thing - without a source of revenue, you just fade away.

I can think of a very small number of open source projects from 2000 that still survive today.

This is the same kind of thinking I have seen so often in "historical buildings" - some old hotel is due to get torn down, a number of people rally to "save it", so it is taken off the chopping block - until it collapses a few years later from a total lack of money for maintenance from those same people that wanted to "preserve history".

[ergophobe]

Delicious is one of the few early Web 2.0 services I actually use.

I would rather see Reddit, Digg, Twitter and Stumbleupon all disappear before Delicious.

Question: how much would I actually pay for Delicious? Maybe $10/year. Not more.

Strange that this comes shortly after Delicious acquired XMarks, which would be my second choice after Delicious. Now I guess both may be gone.

The XMarks blog says

We’ve heard the news about Delicious, and want our users to know that we’re currently working on a solution for migrating your Delicious bookmarks directly to Xmarks.

It’s already possible to import your Delicious bookmarks by exporting to your favorite browser, setting up and installing Xmarks, and then syncing the browser data to your Xmarks account. We recommend checking out the Lifehacker article on how to get started: [lifehacker.com...]

We will have a direct importer available within the next day or so to make the process even easier.

Src: [blog.xmarks.com...]

[physics]

Oh what the ? I actually use delicious. They should just kill that spam fest they call Yahoo! Mail and get it all over with.

[tictoc]

I was just thinking today that when a site gets bought by AOL or Yahoo it faces the grim reaper.

[StoutFiles]

I doubt anyone under that age of 30 has ever heard of AltaVista.

25 here, and I used AltaVista for a while before I switched to some weird startup company called Google.