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Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

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Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#261

Post by neworbit »

lkrubner wrote: post #80

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?

Hell, I would make Yahoo an offer. Or I'd syndicate with other HN readers. Anyone game? Anyone know who at Yahoo to sell this to?

My initial thought would be something along the lines of a 20% profit share for the next three years, guarantee at least $2M over that term, 5% equity in the new firm.

Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#263

Post by elrodeo »

First Google Wave, now Delicious. I was using both of them. That Delicious will probably shutdown is bad enough. But WHAT IS WITH ALL OF MY CAREFULLY TAGGED BOOKMARKS? Even if I can export them somehow, what I'm gonna do with them?

Now that's exactly why I am -- and always was -- against webapps and my data being in a cloud.

Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#264

Post by brendano »

petercooper wrote: post #56
seldo wrote: post #21

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.

never made use of the enormous flow of user sharing data they were getting to do anything interesting. It's a shame they didn't, because many of us users sure did/do. By virtue of its popularity and simplicity, you could know almost every page with any merit was in its system and tagged, making it easy to discover stuff you hadn't even bookmarked yet. Example: Want a good Python tutorial about threads? http://www.del…

Everyone loves to say "Delicious tags are great data for finding relevant information," but I'm not so sure -- at least for doing keyword queries, compared to web search engines. The right comparison is: is Delicious tagging really better than anchor text from the general Web? "Anchor text" means, the text in or near links pointing to the page. It's like an implicit noisy tagging system the Web provides (if you have a good crawl of it). It's a key component in web search. For example, if you Google for "python threads tutorial" you find nice stuff too.

I did hear a second-hand story about Yahoo web search, for what it's worth. When the Delicious acquisition happened, of course they were super excited for this very reason -- that Delicious should constitute a high-quality dataset (that Google didn't have!) Then they tried all sorts of things to incorporate it into their relevance ranking algorithm, but never could get it to work. I personally think Yahoo search had good relevance algorithm people, and therefore, if you believe this story, that Delicious data is not useful for web search relevance.

So I understand this story might be hard for others to verify. But I think it's reasonable to assume that if the data really was valuable, they would have used it for web search, and someone would have bragged about it at some point -- especially given the large amount of interest from the wider developer and computer science community about how potentially useful the Delicious dataset should be.

Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#265

Post by MichaelMassing »

kloncks wrote: post #228

Any idea on how much money Yahoo's actually losing by just running Delicious? Side note: I've always wondered why Yahoo hasn't tapped into the vast amount of good data that is Delicious to supplement and improve their search engine? Talk about having access to a firehose. Side side note: Seriously, what company does layoffs a week before Christmas!?

Besides the Christmas timing, Yahoo quite recently upgraded the Delicious servers. Apart from whatever capital expense was involved, the occupation of the Delicious team in implementing the migration might have left them with the impression that they had a future. It's impossible to know in a corporation who knows what and who's blowing smoke for the company. Still, the tenor of pre-layoff comments from the team in their unusually candid support forum suggests that at least some of them were totally blindsided.

Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#266

Post by jshen »

lepht wrote: post #117
petercooper wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but there's some major differences between bookmarking and searching. 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 ev…

It needs to be combined with something else. Imagine if hn or reedit knew which pages you like because they host your bookmarks. The homepage could be completely tailored to you, and now users have a reason to visit often and there is advertiser real-estate.

Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#267

Post by xiongchiamiov »

lepht wrote: post #105
Jun8 wrote: post #85

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.

This might be bad timing, but I finally discovered a Chrome extension that's basically there- Chromicious ( https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/animchmhhndbcfah... ) I absolutely _need_ a viable delicious alternative, too. xMarks looks like the closest bet, but their UI isn't intuitive and it's coated in ugly.

Depending on what you use in delicious, pinboard.in may be a good replacement. It has all the things from delicious I used, none of the things I didn't, and a few other cool features (like saving notes directly, rather my my system of saving pastebins).

Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#268

Post by xiongchiamiov »

idlewords wrote: post #185
calvinf wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet. I looked at signing up, but the password field is plain text. What's up w/ that?

It's pale plain text at password creation time, and regular password dots when you login. Saves having to have a 'confirm password' box.

It surprised me, but then I went "huh, that makes sense" and continued on.

Guess I'm the odd one out.

Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#269

Post by MichaelMassing »

jacquesm wrote: post #223
ams6110 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're going to have to cap it at some point, because it will become prohibitive. At 500,000 users it would be $500 to sign up.

It's economies of scale reversed, normally you'd expect the price for everybody to go down over time, not up. Wonder what the way is that is justified to the end users.

In order to arrive at economies of scale, you have to first provide for the expenses of ramp-up. So far, admission is nominal for the value its payers perceive. Plotting growth against current cost should give a pretty good forecast of how much is too much. Of course, under the current special circumstances, we could even see a freeze.

Re: Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

#270

Post by cuppster »

tocomment wrote: post #66

Anyone want to do a weekend hackathon with me and build a replacement? We could probably capitalize on delocios shutting down to get some traction.

Today I put together a WordPress plugin/theme to import delicious bookmarks and make them browsable at http://b.cuppster.com/ and a little write up at http://goo.gl/7lus7

Anyone interested in me posting this code? turning it into a collab. project?

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