YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have purchased Delicious from Yahoo, affirming those earlier rumors that Yahoo denied. This week, the Delicious blog confirmed the sale and announced that the management hand-off will occur “approximately July 2011.”
Hurley and Chen are launching a new “information discovery service” but where does that leave current Delicious customers?
Back in December, there was a flurry of hand-wringing as people around the world sought to preserve their bookmarks. Although there are several solutions (I archived all my bookmarks to Pinboard, a paid service, and also moved them to Diigo, a free service), none of them offered the richness and depth that comes from social tagging.
As part of the migration, you need to login to Delicious and agree to let Yahoo migrate your content while also agreeing to the Avos terms of service and privacy policy.
I recommend that you — at a minimum — back up your bookmarks before July.
To do that, login to Delicious and select “settings” then scroll down to “export/backup bookmarks“. I recommend you accept the default setting, which exports both tags and notes. After you click “export” you’ll find a file in your “downloads” folder (depending on your browser configuration). There is no “confirmation” message on the Delicious export page.
Alternatively (or in addition) you can import your bookmarks into a service like Pinboard or Diigo, which is being adopted by a lot of educators. I like Diigo because it makes it easy for me to also archive tweets that I favorite. Now if it would also pull tweets with links … or tweets by hashtag …
However, Diigo does not (yet) have the group social tagging findability that makes Delicious unique.
And that’s my prayer. That Avos maintains and expands the public aggregation of shared bookmarks that Delicious pioneered.
2 replies on “What The Yahoo Sale Of Delicious Means To You”
Thanks, Tac! Me, too, re future of Delicious. Although I’ve started using Diigo, my heart belongs with Delicious. :-)
I love Diigo. I’ve been using it for 4 or 5 years but I’m still glad to see del.icio.us gain new life. They were one of the first “new media” darlings. I always felt it had huge unrealized potential. I have high hopes we’ll see good things from the new owners.