AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by teej on Thursday September 29, 2011 @12:09PM (#3053007)

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 and move along - any attempt to revive it is folly.

AVOS is ultimately at fault here. They didn't want to hurt the feelings of the Delicious old guard, so they made it sound like everything was ok. But everything -wasn't- ok with the product those users fell in love with, it was being obliterated. The best thing AVOS can do now is help users come to terms with the present reality.

Ultimately, the re-launch was the right move - the delicious of 2004 cant survive in today's web. But AVOS's communication around the transition just wasnt frank enough. They should have just held a funeral.

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by DanielRibeiro on Thursday September 29, 2011 @12:32PM (#3053106)

I use delicious on a daily basis, and I feel that the problem it solves is very much alive. Maybe I am a bit of a power user, as I search and tag (and love the automatic tag suggestions) all my delicious links from a FF plugin.

But I believe it is still a solution for a very persistent problem, and as long as it solves it, it will be able to survive very well in today's web.

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by aespinoza on Thursday September 29, 2011 @01:06PM (#3053307)

I agree. I use delicious on a daily basis. The problem it solves is there.

The main problem is the fact that they are doing a crappy job at releasing. I don't think they planned this very well.

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by DanielRibeiro on Thursday September 29, 2011 @01:09PM (#3053318)

Agreed. I had my fair share of problems with Delicious these days. The linked article is very relevant. But I wish it was better, not gone.

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by Hisoka on Thursday September 29, 2011 @01:41PM (#3053437)

Evernote has replaced the need for Delicious for me

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by LiveTheDream on Thursday September 29, 2011 @03:07PM (#3053800)

> the delicious of 2004 cant survive in today's web

The old delicious had all the features I ever wanted it for. When the "sunset" leak happened, I immediately set up accounts at pinboard and trunkly but continued to bookmark on delicious and let the others pull in from my delicious RSS feed.

Now that the RSS feed is gone, I will start bookmarking on pinboard directly. Pinboard was built to emulate the classic Delicious anyway, and has tag suggestions.

The missing feature is the equivalent of delicious.com/tag/whatever, where you would see a ranked-by-popularity list of URLs that were tagged "whatever". That was always an excellent fallback/discovery tool when I didn't get good search results on Google or a vertical search engine.

EDIT: delicious RSS is back, actually. I guess enough people emailed about it.

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by listic on Thursday September 29, 2011 @01:57PM (#3053499)

> delicious of 2004 cant survive in today's web

For those that haven't got around to using Delicious, can you summarize why?

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by joshu on Thursday September 29, 2011 @03:29PM (#3053872)

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

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by initself on Friday September 30, 2011 @02:41AM (#3055940)

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.

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by drdaeman on Friday September 30, 2011 @04:40AM (#3056222)

AVOS' new TOS specifically forbids any usage of the service by anything that falls outside of common web browser list and is not AVOS-provided software.

I was quite shocked about this condition when I read it.

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Re:AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure by Elepsis on Friday September 30, 2011 @03:39AM (#3056080)

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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