'Don't panic: We're still Delicious,' says Yahoo!-owned Web2.0 outfit Social bookmarking service Delicious won't be shutdown by Yahoo! but is looking to sell its Web2.0 wares to a new suitor. "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 …
I agree that Delicious and other Yahoo properties have loyal followings that appear to not have been actively reciprocated by their Yahoo parent. With Delicious' future in doubt, many people are looking for alternatives.
One alternative I recommend is YourVersion http://YourVersion.com. With YourVersion you can import both your Delicious bookmarks and tags (it keeps your public and private settings for each bookmark).
YourVersion is a real-time discovery engine that lets you discover, bookmark and share tailored web content (news, blogs, webpages, tweets and videos) by your specific interests. In addition to the website, YourVersion has free mobile apps (iPad, iPhone and Android) and browser tools for all browsers that lets you bookmark your discoveries to the YourVersion website as you browse the web.
Pinboard.in charges a signup fee for their delicious-alike service, that fee being $0.001 x the number of current users, so it pays to get in early. Since the delicious rumours broke at the end of last week, the price has gone from $7.45 to $8.45, so a thousand people have signed up. Which is $8000 in revenue, so nice work for a few days for a service that probably runs on a pair of commodity servers or a bit of EC3, but hardly the stuff of billion dollar market floats. I suspect that sets a real value: there will be people who have various reasons to need a collaborative or a centralised bookmarking service, but most people either don't need it, or have it as part of something else (I've never had much luck with the MobileMe bookmark sharing, but it's alleged to work) or tolerate not having it unless they can get it free.
"So free-to-use web 2.0 poster children like these are just moneypits fit only for deep pocketed investors?
Who knew?"
I wouldn't suspect it. I mean, if they charge 0 and have 0 ads, then yes it is. But I would think for something like social bookmarks, that the bandwidth usage is low, CPU usage is low, so it wouldn't take much income to pay costs and turn a profit. Maybe just 1 unobtrusive ad per page.
To me, bookmarks are precisely the kind of thing suited to a cloud solution. I never used to bother trying to keep them because I was forever changing computers, browsers and operating systems. When del.icio.us appeared, I signed up straight away and have thousands of well-organized bookmarks on there. I couldn't bear to lose my bookmarks, so have now joined Pinboard, who seem to have done a nice job of replicating delicious exactly. Clearly some people would pay for this kind of service.
...and clarified their position before the recent mass exodus.
Alternative services have been struggling to cope over the past few days, and presumably enough damage has been done in terms of active users to make the service less attractive to a buyer.
Unless of course the plan was to reduce costs a bit.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
