Delicious / del.icio.us

» see del.icio.us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

del.icio.us launched in september 2003. joshua schachter built it as a side project to keep track of his own bookmarks. the URL was a domain hack: del.icio.us, with the.us being the country code top-level domain for the united states. when domain hacks like that were still novel, this one was the famous example.

the product was social bookmarking. you saved a webpage to your delicious account. you tagged it with relevant words. other delicious users could see what you had saved (unless you marked it private). they could see who else had saved the same page. you could browse pages by tag, see the most-saved pages on a topic, follow specific users whose bookmarks you found valuable.

yahoo bought delicious in december 2005. by all accounts the acquisition price was somewhere between 15 and 30 million dollars. it was a hot deal at the time because delicious had real engaged users and was producing useful tag data. yahoo ran delicious for five years without major investment. in april 2011 they sold it to AVOS Systems, a small company started by youtube co-founders chad hurley and steve chen. AVOS ran it for six more years. on 1 june 2017 they sold it to pinboard. pinboard, run by maciej cegłowski, took over the data and shut the actual delicious service down on 15 june 2017.

~ the record ~

~ what tagging meant ~

before delicious, web bookmarks were organized in folders inside your browser. each browser had its own bookmark store. you could not share bookmarks easily. you could not see what other people had bookmarked. the structure was hierarchical and personal.

delicious replaced folders with tags. instead of putting a bookmark in a "javascript" folder, you tagged it with "javascript" and "tutorial" and "performance". a single bookmark could have many tags. you could view your bookmarks by any tag. you could see the cross-section: pages tagged "javascript" and "tutorial" together.

this was a big deal in 2004-2005. tagging as a way to organize information became a standard pattern in web applications. flickr did it for photos around the same time. gmail did it for email (they called them "labels" but the concept was the same). modern services rarely build single-folder hierarchies anymore. tagging won.

~ how it actually worked ~

the delicious workflow was simple. you installed a browser bookmarklet (a small javascript link in your bookmarks bar). when you wanted to save the current page, you clicked the bookmarklet. a small dialog popped up with the page title and a tag input. delicious would suggest tags based on what other users had tagged similar pages with. you confirmed or changed the tags. the bookmark was saved.

the social part was that everybody else's bookmarks were public by default. you could go to delicious.com/tag/python and see every page anyone had bookmarked with the "python" tag. you could subscribe to a tag's rss feed to get new items. you could see the popular page among delicious users, which was a useful trending signal for tech topics.

this made delicious one of the early tools for staying current on tech. you would check the python tag every few days for new tutorials and articles. you would follow specific users who had good taste for the topics you cared about. it was a precursor to twitter for tech news.

~ the yahoo era ~

yahoo bought delicious in december 2005 for somewhere around 15 to 30 million dollars. the founder, joshua schachter, joined yahoo. for the first year or two yahoo invested moderately in the product. there were small redesigns. the URL changed to delicious.com (dropping the domain hack). the user base kept growing.

then yahoo went into multi-year decline. starting around 2008 most yahoo properties stopped getting serious investment. delicious was one of them. the engineering team got smaller. features stopped shipping. by 2010 the product felt frozen.

in december 2010 a leaked yahoo internal slide listed delicious in a "sunset" category, suggesting it would be shut down. there was a public outcry. yahoo backtracked, said they were not shutting it down, but still wanted to sell it. they found a buyer in AVOS Systems in april 2011.

~ how it actually ended ~

AVOS ran delicious from 2011 to 2017. they redesigned the site, removed some features power users loved, alienated a chunk of the audience, and never recovered the original momentum. by 2016 delicious was a ghost service. there were still loyal users. most of them had migrated to pinboard.

on 1 june 2017 maciej cegłowski announced pinboard had bought delicious. he said the deal was small and the goal was simply to take ownership of the user data and shut down the brand. on 15 june 2017 delicious.com stopped accepting new bookmarks. existing bookmarks were preserved as read-only data, with options for users to migrate to pinboard.

~ the legacy ~

the tag. social tagging is now the default way most web applications organize user-contributed content. instagram tags, twitter hashtags, github topics, gmail labels. the immediate ancestor is delicious (and flickr, doing it in parallel). the idea that a single piece of content could have many overlapping tags rather than one parent folder was settled around 2005-2006, on these sites.

pinboard. maciej cegłowski's pinboard is the spiritual successor. it is paid (subscription model). it is run by one person. it does not take outside investment. it is intentionally small. it has been alive since 2009 and shows no signs of dying. for delicious users who valued the bookmarking workflow, pinboard is where they went and where most of them still are.

the lesson about big-company stewardship of beloved small products. yahoo had a string of these (delicious, flickr, geocities, altavista). all of them had passionate user bases. all of them got neglected to death. the case studies are stacked up. the lesson keeps being re-learned at every big tech acquisition cycle.

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