It appears that Yahoo! plans to shut down several services. I happen to make use of one of the more obscure services – mybloglog. Many who read this blog will likely be more interested in the predicted demise of Delicious.
I am guessing Delicious is the most popular social bookmarking site. It allows users to store, tag and annotate links to web sites. It also allowed access to the link collections of others who had stored the same link and were willing to share their resources. In this way, users have the opportunities to discover some of the “finds” of others with related interests. The Delicious approach was simple and while not as powerful as similar services that followed it had the advantage `of being on the scene at an early point and it engaged a large number of users who invested enough time they were likely reluctant to give up on the service. I guess there was simply no way to monetize the service. Too bad it is not being given/sold to some other company. There would seem to be a base of users worth acquiring.
Delicious would not be my first choice, but I use it because it seems tied in with iPad apps I use to read my RSS feeds (e.g., NewsRack). I can add to my bookmarks as I go through the feeds. If Delicious is not saved, there were will be repercussions for other products.
If you have invested a lot of time in Delicious, you should export your bookmarks. Shutting down Delicious is not a certainty, but it appears many are concerned. The link at the beginning of this post contains information about how to export the resources you have accumulated. Exporting Delicious links and then inputting them to Diigo was easy to do.
P.S. – Within a day or so of this Yahoo! news, Yahoo indicated that it did not intend to shut down Delicious, but rather to abandon it (find a new home). As I originally noted, this makes sense and it would seem to be a valuable resource because of the user base. However, the clumsiness with which this was handled probably has done a lot to erode this base. I have already moved on to Pinboard which was promoted by a number of prominent bloggers. It appears that this was a fairly common response, but Pinboard was struggling to keep up.
I am hedging my bets at present. Anything I send to Delicious automatically gets forwarded to Pinboard. I guess we will see what happens.
