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The writing has been on the wall for delicious for years. They never made any money, never found mainstream adoption, never made use of the enormous flow of use
by seldo 16y ago
The writing has been on the wall for delicious for years. They never made any money, never found mainstream adoption, never made use of the enormous flow of user sharing data they were getting to do anything interesting. They have been operating on a skeleton crew for years. Such a shame.
- joshu 16y agothe system was actually quite a bit larger than they ever talked about. millions of users, etc.
- seldo 16y agoNow that they're shutting it down, I would love to hear your thoughts as founder on why delicious didn't live up to its potential.
- chunkbot 16y agoDelicious lived up to its founders' potential when it was acquired for millions.
- borism 16y agothat's ridiculous. potential of the company is not about who owns the stock or how much cash changed hands in the process. having been part of one particular exit I know all too well that startup founders and ex-employees have deep emotional connection to their former company, no matter how much they got for it.
- verysimple 16y agoJust because Yahoo's expectation$ weren't met doesn't mean delicious didn't live up to its potential. Many people got accustomed to use it as a search engine and it fulfilled its purpose quite nicely. Imagine if facebook couldn't figure out a way to make money, would it then be considered a failure even though millions of people find it useful?
- gaustin 16y ago> Imagine if facebook couldn't figure out a way to make money, would it then be considered a failure even though millions of people find it useful? Depends on who you are. To the investors, that would be a failure. To the people that find it useful, it wouldn't be a failure until it disappeared or otherwise ceased to be of use.
- cdr 16y agoI've gotten the impression it was pretty badly mismanaged by Yahoo after acquisition. Any failure is squarely on Yahoo's shoulders AFAIK.
- po 16y agoAndy Baio was recently on Dan Benjamin's show The Pipeline and he spoke a bit about upcoming.org's acquisition. I believe he described the support he got as underwhelming. Basically you go in, meet with a bunch of groups and then are left by yourself wondering what you're supposed to do. http://5by5.tv/pipeline/31 http://5by5.tv/pipeline/31
- sharjeel 16y agoIf Yahoo is actually shutting it down, would you want to buy it back from them?
- scorpion032 16y agoHe wouldn't want to buy it for a price they acquired it at or more. He can't offer them a price that is lower than that. It wouldn't take that much more effort to build the whole thing all over again, anyway.
- mfukar 16y agoYahoo is shutting it down, ergo their perceived value is significantly lower to justify that decision..
- n00bs 16y agoBy the time that Chris Yeh http://twitter.com/cbyeh http://twitter.com/cbyeh ran Delicious into the ground (and convinced management to nuke it rather than take any blame) the site had far fewer than 1,000,000 active users. Many more had registered but far few had logged in within the past year.
- petercooper 16y agonever made use of the enormous flow of user sharing data they were getting to do anything interesting. It's a shame they didn't, because many of us users sure did/do. By virtue of its popularity and simplicity, you could know almost every page with any merit was in its system and tagged, making it easy to discover stuff you hadn't even bookmarked yet. Example: Want a good Python tutorial about threads? http://www.delicious.com/tag/python+threads+tutorial http://www.delicious.com/tag/python+threads+tutorial - You can pretty much pull things out of your ass and constantly find gold on there. Yahoo has no spine.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- chriseidhof 16y agoIn a way, companies should be in it for the money. That might even have prevented this. Of course, money shouldn't be the only motivator, but in general, companies should aim to make money, very healthy.
- lepht 16y agoMaybe, but I think the only thing that would have been 'prevented' is delicious existing for as long as it did. They've tried to monetize, xmarks tried to monetize, both failed. It seems possible that maybe social online bookmarking services just aren't profitable at this point in time, and can only exist as a 'public service'.
- petercooper 16y agoIt seems possible that maybe social online bookmarking services just aren't profitable at this point in time, and can only exist as a 'public service'. People said that about search in the late 90s. Why Delicious didn't get into advertising is beyond me. With the way everything's tag-based, you'd have had crazy targeting.
- reynolds 16y agoMy mom knows what delicious is. That's pretty mainstream in my book.
- kragen 16y agoWe don't know your mom, so that doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion. What's she like? What's the most mainstream web site she doesn't know about?
- raganwald 16y agoThis has mentioned many times over the years, but looking at the slide, I see they were maintaining both del.icio.us and Yahoo! Bookmarks to the end. The outcome is not entirely surprising.
- greyman 16y agoFail. Kill a product which used to be best in its own niche and which provided valuable data for free... I just don't understand...
- borism 16y agoemphasis on free.