On the rise and fall of Delicious, the online bookmarking service
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:
- 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?
- 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.
I remember delicious being irreplaceable for me as well. I truly think with the right management it could have been a cultural epicenter of the internet, like a reddit or twitter. And it would have been a great acquisition for Yahoo if Yahoo wasn't a train wreck.
But then it languished under Yahoo, then there was the rumor of it shutting down that caused people to flee. Then, in an inexplicable bout of insanity, they brought out the feature called "stacks" (does anybody besides me remember stacks?) and buried tags and even regular links like they no longer existed.
It's really too bad, because they did bookmarks well, and just about everywhere on the internet and every browser does bookmarks is imo excruciatingly bad by comparison, with the exception of pinboard. It could have still been here, and it could have been on top of the world.
Delicious was such a great service and when Yahoo killed it I was so disappointed. I never did find a good replacement for it. Are there any good replacements that I missed?
Pinboard, but it costs money.
Exactly, which is why I'm so fascinated by its downfall. It had so much going for it, and then it just crumbled. What's worse, it took huge swathes of carefully curated information (bookmark) sets with it (at least for those who failed to export their bookmarks). It's one of the reasons why I'm interested in exploring the separation of the content that's bookmarked from the tool/program that's being used to process or present it. If the tool or program goes away, it doesn't preclude you from still doing something useful with that bookmarked info.
I don't know what they are, but I remember seeing stacks mentioned on the Delicious home page when I was looking through the archived versions of it, like on the November 27, 2011 archive, where they mention, "introducing stacks: playlists for the web" on the home page. Can you describe what the concept behind them was?
Stacks were a bundle of links on a single page, like tags, but more useless. It could be viewed as a list or as a pinterest-like cluster of cards. But it wasn't tags, it wasn't really anything. Why they thought that would save the company is beyond me.
Why did they change to delicious.com to begin with?
del.icio.us was nice.
Not sure, Joshua Schachter doesn't seem to have prioritized explaining the name change back when Delicious 2.0 was announced in 2007.
I was so excited about being introduced to Delicious by one of my first college professors. Then there was the Yahoo debacle, so I bailed and went back to paper/pen/browser bookmarks. I recently found Shaarli and want to give it a shot, since it is self-hosted there is no worry of it being sold or shut down, but I do need to finish building my home server before I can use it. Then there is the learning curve, but the benefits must outweigh the negative aspects. Its nice to know I am not the only person that misses Delicious and what it could have been!
Ooh I'm always interested in checking out new bookmarking options even though I know they will invariably let me down because my bookmarking wishes are outlandish lol. I tried a self-hosted bookmarker called BKMRK once, but found it to restrictive and gave up pretty quickly.
I think about this daily. It consumes me. If you had told teenaged me ten or fifteen years ago that this would become one of my enduring fixations, I would have scoffed at you, and yet here we are.
Delicious was acquired by its competitor Pinboard last year. I’m not sure what he’s planning to do with it. Pinboard is great, but I do miss the social aspects of the original site. Seeing who else bookmarked the same things as you was a great way to find interesting stuff.
It seems like he bought it with the intention of preserving a cultural internet artifact, and as a way of preventing additional competition against Pinboard lol.
Also, it's interesting (and hilarious) to read his views on the downfall of Delicious as it was happening.
Also, to follow-up on the tag note that I ended on, I hadn't realized that Delicious actually was the first to introduce the concept of user-controlled tagged bookmarking online: