It took a whole day for Yahoo to make the announcement, probably due to getting approval from their manager and their manager and their manager, but it turns out that Delicious isn’t shutting down. Interestingly, all the Yahoo press today blames the press for letting the Delicious hoopla get out of hand over the past day while Yahoo sent out only corporate speak with little specific to Delicious. Given the amount of mourning that went to Delicious as opposed to say, Yahoo Bookmarks or Yahoo Buzz or AltaVista, the lack of communication was disappointing. Why not tell the public, or at least the bloggers and press, sooner? It certainly would have prevented the PR disaster that was yesterday, especially when half the items on the Delicious front page concerned the supposed closing of the site. That’s sort of like when the new Digg finally went public and the entire front page was covered with articles from Reddit in protest.
Search Engine Land wrote about Yahoo’s flub, and the conclusion is clear: Yahoo devalued Delicious in 24 hours. If Yahoo didn’t think anything of Delicious at the time, Delicious is becoming less active now. There were 79 bookmarks saved in the last minute. That’s just one bookmark every second across the site. Some of that number might be attributed to the late hour, but not all of it. I’ll have to watch site activity over the next few days, including on Monday. Meanwhile, you really need to work on your PR, Yahoo. You can start by correcting rumors in less than 24 hours.