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Delicious is shutting down

It’s no secret that I love Delicious. I have over 15,000 bookmarks on the site and bookmark around ten new things a day, and it’s more powerful and neater than saving my bookmarks in my browser, especially given the volume at which I bookmark.

So when the rumors started spreading that Yahoo was shutting down Delicious, I started to look up Delicious alternatives. I already knew of XMarks and Diigo, and Diigo looked like the best place to go. So I backed up my 15k bookmarks in a 3.3MB file and started to upload the file at Diigo.

Key word: Started. The file uploaded just fine, but the bookmarks started importing at 6:25 tonight. Over five hours later, the bookmarks still importing. Based on what I’ve heard from people with much smaller collections, this process is probably going to take a long time. Clearly Diigo wasn’t prepared for thousands of people importing their Delicious bookmark collections, some of them as large as mine.

But the question remains: Why? Yahoo is known for killing vibrant and brilliant companies after buying them, but Delicious was one of the top 300 websites in the world according to Alexa. Granted, it wasn’t making Yahoo much money; the only ads on the site showed up in search results. Why not try to sell Delicious first or even open source it first before shutting it down altogether? There has to be another option, Yahoo. If you paid attention today, you would have seen how many loyal Delicious users are out there and how popular the service really is. It’s not quite on par with suddenly deciding to shut down Yahoo! mail, but it’s definitely big. Think before you shut it down and cut off all access to the information stored there. Don’t pull another Geocities.

2 replies on “Delicious is shutting down”

Wait…WHAT? Not Delicious! I use it for my bookmarks! Do you know if the alternatives you’ve found are available as Firefox addons?

@Nanda I use Delicious all the time! Apparently it’s not shutting down now, though Yahoo took only a whole day to announce that. The plan is to find another home for Delicious, so don’t worry. Your bookmarks are safe.

I did find Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) though, which has a Firefox addon, but it doesn’t have the ctrl-D add to Delicious option that I use constantly.

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