I don't remember the robots.txt rules for sure, but doesn't that mean they don't allow crawlers at all?

You can't write a simple scraper that is not distributed in 100 of machines across the web to pull out their data.

Actually I just noticed you get 750h of free micro instance time from aws... I wonder if it would be worth doing. I imagine the link+tags are <100GB in total.

That is the most insightful thing I've read today.

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.delicious.com/tag/python+threads+tutorial - You can pretty much pull things out of your ass and constantly find gold on there. Yahoo has no spine.

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.

Why don't they spin it off into a startup? Just open-sourcing the code would be useless and even the data wouldn't hold its value for very long without the application and community continuing. But a startup would have a fighting chance to do something great with it.

Besides, using delicious data would be far too open to SEO abuse.

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.

[1] http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=1886

Let's face it, Google has a lot more capital to back non-profitable products. Yahoo supported Delicious for as long as they could, but ultimately it's hard to justify liabilities like expensive, non-profitable projects to your shareholders.

Google can do it because they've proven that their strategy stuffs the coffers regardless.

(Yahoo is.)

Yahoo has no vision, and now they are too busy chasing their own tails with respect to all the bad press they are getting surrounding their layoffs, lack of technology and utter failure in trending technology.

I understand turn arounds take time but such decisions are going to lead to nowhere.

Sure, they have and had technology - yet their utter failure in vision and management has resulted in them losing an understanding / ability to use their tech.

Late to the party as usual...

Edit: Wow. Someone has to take this private. This is one hell of a valuable database. Yahoo must be staffed by gorillas if they're throwing away this kind of data.

having been part of one particular exit I know all too well that startup founders and ex-employees have deep emotional connection to their former company, no matter how much they got for it.

http://5by5.tv/pipeline/31

Depends on who you are. To the investors, that would be a failure. To the people that find it useful, it wouldn't be a failure until it disappeared or otherwise ceased to be of use.

He can't offer them a price that is lower than that.

It wouldn't take that much more effort to build the whole thing all over again, anyway.

The outcome is not entirely surprising.

  curl https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml

If your security setting blocks using the http://login:pwd@... format, just login to the site and use the link without the login info.

(You can also use wget instead of curl as an alternative.)

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.

@idlewords: just make sure you're ready for the possible flood of new users. :)

The founder is on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1605908

(1) It looks like pinboard.in has the same function for about the same yearly price.

http://historio.us/referrals/NTEyICAgICAg/

You can do it yourself, in turn, to raise the limit up to 2000.

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.

With so many competing products vying to take its place, it will probably be a while before a de facto bookmarking service comes along and gathers a userbase large enough to be useful and years beyond that for that userbase to build the data to a point that approaches what we had with delicious.

Maybe some sort of anonymized delicious data export would be possible?

I'd be shocked if there aren't other tech companies interested in buying the tech, the userbase and the employees (who've just be made redundant presumably at some expense).

What's the justification to shareholders to shutting down as opposed to selling ?

I find it hard to believe that Delicious would have no value to anyone at a fire-sale price.

"Big established companies with their own revenue streams simply don’t have the skillset needed to be the next Y Combinator"

Of course, insofar as YC depends on acquisition, there's a problem there too.

@pavs - Where do you work that's better? What ideas have come out of it that are even worthy of having a Hacker News thread? What products do you work on that people love so much they're distraught with a mention of them not existing? Link me, :D.

> I personally believe that without big players like Yahoo!, many ideas would not become startups because there'd be no exit strategy nor funding.

That has nothing to do with anything I have said.

The real loss here is how you can use it to analyze other people's bookmarks. Almost every page of any merit is tagged and in their system, just because Delicious is/was the biggest game in town.

Wanna find HN links about Java? Try http://www.delicious.com/tag/hn+java .. want a tutorial about making a game in Ruby? http://www.delicious.com/tag/ruby+tutorial+game .. This is absurdly useful even though so few people know about it. It's been my secret weapon for 6 years now because I've always been able to find anything I could even partially remember just by coming up with the tags that might describe it :-(

Does anyone know if delicious' demise affects pinboard's API service in any way? Since pinboard's API documentation just links to delicious, now would be a good time to archive the delicious API documentation.

http://cache.historious.net/cached/841175/

The most fundamental kernel of usability is "does what I expect", and everybody expects password masking everywhere. Everybody expects to type their password twice to register and once to login (the only fundamental distinction!). Everybody is extraordinarily habituated to typing their passwords blind, it's of absolutely no use to display them.

Really, the minimum result you get is that people take longer to sign up because they pause to be infuriated at your design decision.

Don't try to redefine a fundamental UI component that has a universally consistent implementation and is totally orthogonal to the innovative bits of your app. Seriously, stop being an asshole and always use <input type=password> for user-chosen secrets.

Aaand that is one sentence I thought I'd never get to utter. Seriously though, pinboard is great too, and closer to the functionality of delicious. It's mostly a matter of preference.

Guess I'm the odd one out.

The product has improved significantly over the years, especially after the founders left and Yahoo was able to roll back some of the idiotic policy decisions that they'd previously set in stone.

It used to be that if you posted any pictures not taken with a physical camera, your account would be hellbanned, using the same moderation mechanism (NIPSA) used for people posting porn, and Yahoo has eliminated the practice. The site used to be terrible for actually browsing through photos because the founders still considered it to be primarily a social site and not a photo sharing site (it was originally a MMO called Game NeverEnding), and now Yahoo has ajaxified the photo pages for clicking through photos and finally boosted the default display size to be bigger than 400px. The founders said absolutely no to the idea of ever hosting digicam video clips, and now that they're all gone, Yahoo implemented 'long photos'.

Flickr is proof that Yahoo doesn't fuck everything up.

The link is 1.5 years old, but (IMHO, and anecdotal) Flickr's growth has been steady since about then.

Here's their (probably about to be updated) "Should you switch from Delicious?" page: http://pinboard.in/switch/

Edit: 7 minutes later it's now $6.94

http://pinboard.in/help/fee/ (normally in a "why?" popup when you would make a new account)

Right now it's 6.97, so at least 50 signups since the parent (~$350 in revenue in 20 minutes)

Office pool: predict the price at GMT 00:00 tonight.

:)

Wonder what the way is that is justified to the end users.

Where are the best free places to migrate all of your Delicious bookmarks?

------EDIT---

OK, at a minimum you can go here: https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export and download your entire collection (importantly... with tags). This will at least preserve your content and, since I think many of us on HN are of the technical sort, permit you to scrape the data at your leisure. You get a massive (well, in my case) definition list of elements with the following included as attributes on the item's anchor tag: the url, the add date (ADD_DATE=) the private status of the link (PRIVATE=) and the tags (TAGS=). You also get a text description. Very nice!

I was also happy to pay for the service following the LastPass acquisition.

It works for me because I don't tag. Instead, I have a stable set of folders into which bookmarks get sorted. At this point, if something doesn't fit one of these categories, it's probably not relevant to me.

That being said, I also really like Pinboard :)

Note: imports all to one note so not the ideal.

However, if you apply for an API key, there are scripts out there that can parse the delicious export and import into Evernote, including tags. Google for 'delicious export evernote script'.

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!?

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.

It seems to me like this is one way that the failure of large companies can lead to the failure of unrelated startups. And it sucks.

  1. How responsive are the startup founders when I e-mail
     them about problems?

  2. How portable is the work I'm going to put into the 
     site? Data portability is actually probably my number 
     1 concern.

  3. Does the service give me value that I couldn't 
     create with my own server after an hour of coding? 
     (Why would I sign up for yet another contacts service 
     when I can host my own LDAP server for free?)

  4. Is there a vibrant community supporting the startup 
     from the get to?

http://twitter.com/Blakei/status/15488532072103936

"@bpm140 @joshu Really dude? Can't wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone!"

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.

Another angle; recruitment, at least for software developers. For active users, del.icio.us is one of best reflections of your skillset out there, with the exception of github. Potential employers or headhunters pay to search for matching profiles.

I would also like to point out http://pinboard.in/howto/#import

OAuth import will be up soon.

$ curl https://user:[email protected]/v1/posts/all > delicious.xml

I was running it from cron to do daily backups.

EDIT: I've just noticed that somebody has already posted a similar command, so sorry for a duplicate.

1. good browser integration - even through bookmarklets 2. good tagging system 3. ability to search my own stuff like http://www.delicious.com/philfreo/git+tutorial 4. ability to search lots of other peoples bookmarks 5. reliable 6. portability (so I know I can export and move elsewhere)

Basically, I want delicious to stay alive...

Seriously, companies must take responsibility for the data. It's important to note that delicious also has private bookmarks so it's not possible to just backup the repository and distribute it.

In my opinion the best way to solve this is to set up an auction for the "delicious asset".

It'd be a pity to leave delicious and just trash it, instead of archiving it somewhere.

[1] http://www.archive.org/

[2] http://www.archive.org/details/301works

There's no way I'm going to use a service when I have to create a Yahoo account.

Same goes with Flickr.

Another advantage is that I can share links form multiple machines.

I am avoiding chrome until they have something like noscript plugin (which will likely not happen) in firefox

I don't want to lose the ability to save bookmarks this way.

Is there anything out there on the web that duplicates the functionality?

I already have a personal wiki for my notes and lists, but I'm looking for something a bit more specialized for bookmarks. I like the concept of tagging my bookmarks, which a wiki doesn't offer.

http://www.altavista.com/about/

So I've been looking around for an alternative. I've been using Diigo, though the UI (at least for the bookmarklet) is not all that much better.

The comments here about Pinboard, though, motivated me to go sign up. I figure, better now than later after the exodus drives the cost up. :)

Say what you mean, Yahoo.

Weasel words may be used to detract from an uncomfortable fact, such as the act of firing staff. By replacing "firing staff" with "headcount reduction", one may soften meaning."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word#In_business

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

Google Bookmarks looks like a possibility. I don't care that it doesn't have the social thing and I want something with good browser integration.

Does anyone have an working instructions for migrating to Google Bookmarks? Most sites refer to this page which appears to be broken - http://persistent.info/delicious2google/

For someone with almost 9000 bookmarks it came out to 1.7MB .html file. (and yes, tags are in the source)

I wasn't using Delicious to full extent, as my needs were simple, just cross browser, cross platform, cross machine bookmark service.

Will have to check out Pinboard, Historious and other alternatives mentioned in this thread.

Aside from Flickr, all Yahoo! is useful for now is checking the latest sports scores.

I remember as a kid back in the 90s, Yahoo! was the place to go if you ever needed to find something. That's been heavily supplanted by Google now.

Hearing about the recent layoffs is pretty depressing. Is Yahoo! ever going to recover?

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

Am I missing something here?

Thanks!

I realize they probably have added some Yahoo specific stuff, like single sign on, so disentangling it might be too costly?

http://www.shareaholic.com/services

(a list of over 50 bookmarking services)

I wish the general attitude would change to "I'm willing to pay for services that I find useful" instead of "Everything should be free !!!!"...

Google Bookmarks, Pinboard, Historious, Diigo, Netvouz, Favbot, Favilous, Licorize, Wonderpage, Wheatt, Wajam, Markr, Xmarks.

Please add others which I may have missed...

The entire value proposition of logging into a website in order to bookmark other websites is lost on me.

I wish I could grok the value, but I can't.

What I really want though is something that will let me continue to use the Delicious extension for Firefox.

At the very least, a Delicious-themed landing page with a "how to migrate your bookmarks" and a few emails exchanged with bloggers who've lamented the loss of Delicious ought to draw a few more people's attention to StavrosK's site.

Shameless plug: I run http://feedjit.com/ and our core product is very similar to mybloglog, so while it's sad to see what Scott and his team built get cut like this, it opens up opportunity for us and we are very passionate about the space.

Would love to be proven wrong, but even the "people's champion" here, pinboard, doesn't even approach the usability or functionality of delicious.

There's no first party Chrome extension. The best third party one, felicious, doesn't do tag completion much less suggested tags. The latency between adding a bookmark and having felicious show it is atrocious, even with 'auto-sync' enabled.

Ugh.

"Due to massive traffic today, imports may take a while to complete. Sorry for the delay!"

sent e-mail to delicious and yahoo - if anyone knows a quicker contact let me know! THANKS!