Yahoo To Shut Down Del.icious

could be bad news if you use it...
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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.

In some kind of weird founder solidarity, the slide was originally posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier.

Listed under the ominous ?Sunset? are: Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks

Under ?Merge? are: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Sideline, FireEagle, Yahoo Events and Yahoo People Search.

It also looks like sundry Yahoo properties like Yahoo Deals and Yahoo Calendar will be made into features.

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: http://support.delicious.com/forum/index.php

http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=5605&page=1#Item_12

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/

This kinda sucks but at least yahoo answers is not affected!

Yahoo has been going further and further down hill for years now. I thought they were going to swing a deal with Microsoft?

I am wondering how long it is before FB just writes them and aol a check?

NO, SAY IT AIN'T SO. This sucks...I use delicious to bookmark everything. This can't be good.

We should all do a group buy...Cmon we can get a couple of hundred grand to get it re-rolling right? FFS yahoo is stupid. They need some classes in monetization lol...

I hope they give us some kind of way to export our delicious bookmarks and maybe set them up in a format where we can integrate them on some other service.

Great site and an original pioneer of web 2.0, sad news if it happens.

Always thought delicious.com would have made a better recipe site

using an online bookmark site is risky.

The Scarlet Pimp said:

using an online bookmark site is risky.

Click to expand...

Agreed, like when digg rolled out V4 and everyone lost the diggs they've been storing throughout the years.

Leo Laporte and Mike Arrington recommend Pinboard:


Anyone use this? First time I've seen a bookmarking site charging for sign up

Sometimes the big fish company scoops up a smaller competitor specifically in order to shut it down. Yahoo may have felt the field of rival bookmarking and social media sites is too crowded, and is acquiring some of them to winnow out the field. Years ago, there was an excellent, critically praised free web-based email site called Mailblocks that was doing well (it included a challenge-response feature that was better than spamarrest at stopping all spam cold). AOL took it over, and in two months had it closed down. None of its great features were incorporated into AOL's email.

This only points out have safe it to keep stuff online in the cloud. Same with games that need online activation, Google Docs etc. I am not saying that they will disappear, but shareholders can conclude that they don't need that service again and simply shut it down.
I have been dragging some of my stuff on computer from before this century and they are still live and kicking. If I put them in the cloud, they would be already long gone.

Altavista is still around? Well...not for much longer but still!

Innovator said:

I hope they give us some kind of way to export our delicious bookmarks and maybe set them up in a format where we can integrate them on some other service.

Great site and an original pioneer of web 2.0, sad news if it happens.

Click to expand...

I don't see why they don't try to sell and get SOMETHING out of it. Like sell a 51% share, so they don't have to take care of it, but can collect 49% of the profits, but aren't liable for the losses.

Bad, no horrible asset management!

Yahoo videos is also being canceled, or so said an email from them recently.

I wasn't even aware of yahoo videos.

Update... Yahoo is NOT shutting down Delicious.

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.

What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

- 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.


Glad I didn't jump on the pinboard wagon just yet. It started out at $7.49 earlier yesterday, now it's up to $8.47. RIDICULOUS.

sounds like someone complained...

Former Yahoo Exec: "Delicious Is in Peril," Sale Unlikely

While rumors and responses about bookmarking service Delicious swirl around the web, one former Yahoo and Delicious employee who maintains close ties with relevant teams says the service's future is most certainly in jeopardy — in fact, he speculates that while the data may end up stored somewhere, the service itself has a slim chance of survival.

During the past week, a slide from a Yahoo all-hands meeting was leaked; the slide showed that Yahoo was calling "sunset" on Delicious.

Yahoo retorted the following day that it wasn't killing off Delicious; rather, it planned to sell the service. Internally, we wondered who would want to buy the easily replicable, none-too-profitable site.

Now, Stephen Hood, who has held senior and director-level project management positions at Yahoo and Delicious since 2005, has added his voice to the mix "as someone who was on the inside for a while and who wants very much to see Delicious live on."

In a blog post today, Hood states the obvious — that Yahoo has already laid off much of the Delicious team and doesn't plan to maintain the service itself — and the not-so-obvious, including some tidbits about Delicious's technology that indicate it might not be a good buy for another company.

"During my time at Delicious," Hood writes, "we rebuilt the entire infrastructure to deeply leverage a number of internal Yahoo technologies. It's all great stuff but not exactly easy to remove or replace. Yahoo may have to license some of this technology to the buyer."

For the same reason, Hood states that open-sourcing the service doesn't make a lot of sense.

Ultimately, Hood believes Delicious's best bet is to survive as an archive of " the collective online journeys of millions of users during a time when the Web was evolving dramatically," perhaps through an entity such as the Library of Congress. In that case, Delicious would cease to operate as a service with users and features; only the data would remain as a sort of digital scrapbook.

In a best-case scenario, Yahoo itself would facilitate and manage the exporting of public Delicious data. And of course, users and developers are already working on exporting tools in a grass-roots way.

In the meantime, we're holding our breath to see if Delicious will find a buyer. We hope for the sake of the site's founder that his product has a future — and we hope that future is brighter than Delicious's recent past with Yahoo.

http://mashable.com/2010/12/19/delicious-yahoo-exec-opinion/

http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/delicious-founder/

LOL someone neg repped me for my post saying Yahoo is not shutting Delicious.

"I hate u"

Seriously? That's just silly.

If I was Yahoo I'd try and sell the site, unless that's what they mean by wanting to shut it down (if they are planning to anyway)