On the rise and fall of Delicious, the online bookmarking service

silva-rerum
2018-06-07T04:57:32Z

Online/digital bookmarking and excerpting is something that really interests me because I think most if not all existing options for it fall very short of the functionality I wish existed, and that I think could exist.

One of the first online bookmarking services I used was Delicious, and for a few years it was irreplaceable for me. However it languished after it was bought by Yahoo and then resold, and since then I’ve observed its slow and steady decline from afar.

The purpose of this post is twofold:

1. I want to know the current state of online bookmarking for you. I’m curious to know if it’s as much of an unmet need in anyone else’s life as it seems to be in mine.

Were you once a bookmarker and gave up due to the seeming futility of it?

Have you never been interested in bookmarking and/or don’t see the point of it?

Are you an active bookmarker, and if so what tools or workflows do you use, and what kinds of content do you bookmark?

2. I thought I would share some of the research I did into Delicious’ various design iterations over the years via the Internet Archive. It’s a cool birds-eye survey of how the service’s ethos, goals and design changed over time. Beyond the value it provides as a case study, I think there are greater lessons and insights that can be gained from observing the rise and fall of what was once such a beloved online service.

del.icio.us | 16 September 2005

del.icio.us | 20 December 2005

del.icio.us | 11 October 2006

Delicious.com | 11 May 2011

Delicious.com | 27 November 2011

Delicious.com | 12 May 2012

Delicious.com | 30 August 2012

Delicious.com | 14 October 2013

The period between 2013 and 2016 seems to be one endless loading screen from the archive’s perspective

Delicious.com | 15 March 2016

At some point in 2016, they went back to their original domain name – del.icio.us | 14 May 2016

As a sidenote, I also found this explanation of Delicious' approach to tagging to be very interesting: del.icio.us/help/tags | 21 February 2006

I hadn't realized that Delicious was actually the first to introduce the concept of user-controlled tags for bookmarks:

When Delicious was first launched, it was the first use of the term "tag" in the modern sense, and it was the first explicit opportunity where website users were given the ability to add their own tags to their bookmarks so that they could more easily search for them at a later time. This major breakthrough was not much noticed as most thought the application at the time "cool" but obvious. – Source

Edit: I hope it's alright to edit a post this many hours after having submitted it. There were a few important updates that I really wanted to include here.

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