Yandex.Zakladki

» see zakladki.yandex.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 22 June 2000 Yandex put out a press release saying it had built the first Russian service for keeping catalogs of user links on the internet. That is a heavy sentence for what the thing actually was, which was a page holding your bookmarks so that you could reach them from a different computer than the one you saved them on.

In 2000 that was a real problem and not a small one, because your bookmarks were a file inside one installation of one browser on one machine. Reinstall Windows and they were gone, and sitting down at a computer that was not yours meant starting from an empty Favorites menu. Zakladki turned the list into something that lived on Yandex's side and came back when you logged in, and later it let you make a folder public so other people could read it.

It ran for close to fifteen years without much happening to it. Nothing about the service failed. The problem arrived from underneath. Chrome shipped with sync and Firefox followed, and by 2012 Yandex was shipping its own browser that synced as well, which made the separate bookmarks page a step nobody had a reason to take anymore.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

I did not have a Yandex account and never went looking for one. The whole Runet asked you to register before it would do anything for you, the interface was Cyrillic, and from Turkey the same idea was already sitting in English on del.icio.us with nothing to sign up for beyond an email address. There was no reason to cross over, so I did not, and the Russian half of this era is a thing I have only ever read about.

The category itself I did use, and it went the same way everywhere. Social bookmarking looked like the future for about four years and then browsers absorbed the feature and the sites turned into link-spam farms or shut down. Zakladki is the version of that story where the shutting down took until 2015 because Yandex had no particular reason to hurry.

~ the day it died ~

Yandex published the notice on 17 March 2015 and gave a month's warning. The reason given was flat and honest: browsers had gained sync, so demand had fallen away. CNews put a number on how far, and it was under two thousand users a day for a service that had been running since the first year of the decade before.

The exit was better handled than most. You could download your bookmarks as an HTML file and import them into any browser, and if you did nothing, Yandex generated the file for you on 13 April and dropped it into your Yandex.Disk, where it stayed. There are worse ways for fifteen years of links to end than as a file you can still open.

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