111–120 of 301 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the system was actually quite a bit larger than they ever talked about. millions of users, etc.
Now that they're shutting it down, I would love to hear your thoughts as founder on why delicious didn't live up to its potential.
I have a been working on a replacement http://toadjaw.com but haven't opened it up to the public. It allows importing from delicious.com. Anybody interested in using it?
Damn, I wish I had the money to make Yahoo an offer. I worked on a service in 2005 that was suppose to compete with del.icio.us, but our service never got off the ground. I've always admired the basic idea of del.icio.us, and I think there are a million interesting things that could be done with that site. Surely if Yahoo is shutting it down, they'd also be willing to sell it cheap? I wonder how cheap?
The writing has been on the wall for delicious for years. They never made any money, never found mainstream adoption, never made use of the enormous flow of user sharing data they were getting to do anything interesting. They have been operating on a skeleton crew for years. Such a shame.
Noooo! I love delicious and am using it daily, it's one of the reasons I don't completely switch to Chrome (since the plugin is not as good as the Firefox one). OK, time to dire off the API and suck off all the bookmarks. Where should I put all my bookmarks? What other bookmark service has a nice browser plugin, APIs, etc? After this I'm also convinced that Yahoo is hopeless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, but I think the only thing that would have been 'prevented' is delicious existing for as long as it did. They've tried to monetize, xmarks tried to monetize, both failed. It seems possible that maybe social online bookmarking services just aren't profitable at this point in time, and can only exist as a 'public service'.
It seems possible that maybe social online bookmarking services just aren't profitable at this point in time, and can only exist as a 'public service'. People said that about search in the late 90s. Why Delicious didn't get into advertising is beyond me. With the way everything's tag-based, you'd have had crazy targeting.
The fact that the majority of users are naturally dependent on searching means there's (obviously) massive exposure to eyes and wallets, and there always has been. Whether that exposure could be turned into profits was what was questioned in the 90s.
Bookmarking is different. I'm going to offend some people here by whipping out my anecdotal evidence: I don't know _any_ non-technical (read: average) users who are interested in maintaining a bookmark library, even if the benefits were explained to them.
On the slim chance that we could somehow convince them that it was worthwhile, I still can't see most of them being interested in browsing tag clouds and bookmark trees of other users, which they would have to do in order to be exposed by this 'ultra-specific' advertising. Anything beyond using it as a regular browser bookmark menu that syncs across computers is pretty unlikely in my opinion.
Why not just check Facebook to see what people are looking at? Or, for the 'geekier' of the mainstream, just check Twitter.
xMarks, a bookmarking service with 2million+ users, in their going away blog post[1] alluded to this same barrier:
> We built it and it put it front of potential advertisers. Many were interested, but ultimately the feedback was negative: our user base was too small to be worth their time and attention.
It's been a busy day over here.
http://www.shareaholic.com/services
(a list of over 50 bookmarking services)
I'll start: Use the browser plugin to deliver highly targeted but low profile ads to users. The targeting would be based on the longitudinal interest data they have for millions of users, many of whom have been tagging their interests for months or years. For active users, I think this data is better than facebook targeting info.