According to PC World, Yahoo will shut down several of its Web properties, including Delicious, according to a leaked Yahoo presentation slide that was posted on Twitter.
I was hoping this was just a rumor. Oh, say it ain’t so …. but this TechCrunch confirms the demise of one of my favorite tools pointing to this post by Liz Gannes.
My early days in social media were spent immersed in tagging and social bookmarking. Marnie Webb introduced me to the NpTech Tag and a whole nonprofit tech community embraced it. My first screencast was about tagging and featured the social bookmarking service, delicious.
I met Joshua Schacter in 2005 at the Berkman Center and heard him speak shortly before delicious was acquired by Yahoo. He described delicious as a “memory platform that helps you remember information with other people.” And, that is precisely how I’ve used my delicious account that has 5902 bookmarks — as a memory platform to write blog posts.
Now, I’m faced with finding a new memory platform. Delicious got its start because Schacter had created the tool for his own needs. So, I’m half hoping his tweet isn’t tongue in check.
Alyson Kapin set up this petition Yahoo to make del.icio.us open source:
Gizmodo has this post explaining how to export your bookmarks and a pointer to an old Lifehacker post with some alternatives. Here’s a google document that has the pros/cons of the alternatives.
One the alternatives that I heard about was Diigo.
Diigo is different from most bookmarking tools; it allows you to not only save the URL of a website, but annotate it, archive it (instead of merely saving the address of it), and share both your bookmarks and archived research with others. Even if you’re currently only interested in a bookmarking service, it’s nice to know that if you wish to expand your scope to archiving pages and collecting text in addition to just bookmarking URLs, you can do so easily with Diigo. You can access Diigo through their website, via the Diigo toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer, via bookmarklet, or via the Diigo Chrome extension.
So, I’ve exported by bookmarks and have imported them into diigo and now patiently waiting …. while I explore other options.
Thomas Vanderwal suggested pinboard which looks like an early version of delicious or perhaps Schacter’s simple del.icio.us clone. Aliza Sherman and Amy Sample Ward suggested Pearless, a visual bookmarking tool. Michele Martin offers her thoughts on alternatives, as does Marnie Webb who links to folks from the NpTech Community, including Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, Peter Campbell for Idealware, Kabissa, and Alexandra Samuel over at the Harvard Business Review.
Update: Yahoo posted today that they are planning to sell delicious, not close it. This prompted a pr crisis – see Danny Sullivan’s post.
If you have been dependent on delicious, what bookmarking service are you switching too?
