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AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

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Re: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

#51

Post by firebones »

teej wrote: post #16
jonmc12 wrote: post #13

Writing has been on the wall for some time. Surprised anyone that uses Delicious seriously did not switch to Pinboard or equivalent. No sure Avos is to blame so much as delicious users not being proactive about the inevitable.

The reaction of Delicious users is a product of poor communication on behalf of AVOS. They wanted it to sound like they were simply taking the reigns when, in fact, they were building a new product. Nothing from this email indicates that the old delicious is going away: "Dear Delicious User, This is our final notice to let you know that Delicious is transitioning to a new owner, AVOS. To continue using Delicious, you…

That read so much like an ultimatum (and was honestly the first email from them that I actually saw about the transition) that I had little desire to migrate since I had already moved to Pinboard. Kind of like if Facebook sent something similar...meh, just dump me already, my life exists outside your free service.

Re: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

#53

Post by dajobe »

What a pathetic rant. I was totally not surprised that day #1 of a total codebase rewrite would not have all the features of the old version. AVOS hinted enough at this too. At least they are innovating and responding to users. Having said that, I do hope 'networks' returns since that's the feature I miss, so far.

Re: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

#54

Post by sciurus »

Rotor wrote: post #30
sciurus wrote: post #20

That article needs to come with a huge "YMMV" disclaimer. I can still save my bookmarks via the bookmarklet. I can still view my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/sciurus . The transition hasn't impacted me at all.

Did you migrate your Delicious account to AVOS previous to the move?

I opted in a while before the move. I didn't do anything else.

Re: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

#55

Post by sciurus »

mun2mun wrote: post #33
sciurus wrote: post #20

That article needs to come with a huge "YMMV" disclaimer. I can still save my bookmarks via the bookmarklet. I can still view my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/sciurus . The transition hasn't impacted me at all.

Do you see all tags you saved there? Did you browsed by tag after the transition? For example your programming tag collection have small set of links. I am sure there was hundreds of them before the transition. I haven't faced password reset problem though. I exported my bookmarks after hearing about transition. Lucky me :).

Nothing has jumped out as missing. I may just be lucky in this regard. Being of the sysadmin persuasion, I have many more bookmarks tagged "software" than I do "programming".

Re: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

#56

Post by tomfaulhaber »

initself wrote: post #43
sciurus wrote: post #20

That article needs to come with a huge "YMMV" disclaimer. I can still save my bookmarks via the bookmarklet. I can still view my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/sciurus . The transition hasn't impacted me at all.

Can you use a browser plugin with it (like I have been doing for many years now)? Because I can't.

Yeah, but you have to clear your browser and reload. The instructions are here: http://deliciousengineering.blogspot.com/ under "Firefox Extension Fixed." They claim that the IE extension is fixed as well, but there seem to be no special instructions.

Re: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

#57

Post by initself »

joshu wrote: post #38
teej wrote: post #3

I can understand why hardcore lovers of the old Delicious are upset at the "changes". Change can be really tough if you've stuck with a site through that many years. But in the end, the old Delicious isn't changing - it's dead. What now exists is an entirely new site under the delicious coat of arms. What users dont understand is that there is no "going back". It's upsetting that your beloved site is dead, but mourn…

changes are one thing. arbitrarily changing the tag separator from spaces to commas is entirely another.

Amen, brother. I'd really like to hear your take on the psychology of a mind that thinks changes like that that completely break APIs (Net::Delicious) is a good idea.

Re: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

#58

Post by initself »

vutekst wrote: post #6

This debacle is what made me finally switch to Pinboard. Well, that and I like the Pinboard guy's developer blog. http://blog.pinboard.in/

Me too. Logging in a seeing just a partial listing of all the tags I've created since 2005 was disheartening.

Also didn't like running Net::Delicious and watching it fail.

Or watching my Firefox Delicious plugin completely fail after years of solid everyday use.

Unfortunately, my import into Pinboard left me with incomplete link history, but I assume the dev will help me figure out why it didn't like my entire feed.

Re: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

#59

Post by Elepsis »

joshu wrote: post #38
teej wrote: post #3

I can understand why hardcore lovers of the old Delicious are upset at the "changes". Change can be really tough if you've stuck with a site through that many years. But in the end, the old Delicious isn't changing - it's dead. What now exists is an entirely new site under the delicious coat of arms. What users dont understand is that there is no "going back". It's upsetting that your beloved site is dead, but mourn…

changes are one thing. arbitrarily changing the tag separator from spaces to commas is entirely another.

Agreed that these changes shouldn't be made arbitrarily, but spaces as tag separators has always been my biggest frustration with delicious and is one of the biggest reasons I (to my eventual regret) ended up using Ma.gnolia back in the day.
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