11 ms·

Hey Yahoo, Can you please open source Delicious?

413 points by codybrown 16y ago

codybrown 16y ago
We are also compiling stories about present use cases of Delicious. If you are a user, post them here and I'll update the question.
- bad_user 16y ago
  I've been using it to find interesting links. The difference between Delicious and news aggregators like Reddit / Digg / HN is that the rating of links is a side-effect, not a conscious action. As a result ranking on Delicious does not prefer yellow journalism, obscure interests or vanity displays; much like Google's ranking but small enough to not be a target for promotion through SEO.
  - codybrown 16y ago
    Updated the question. Thanks.
- adambyrtek 16y ago
  I never really cared about the social features. For me Delicious (and now Pinboard) is like a personal knowledge base, supporting my unreliable memory. For example when I want to check my favourite Vim plugins I search for tags vim+plugins+favs. I have more than 2k entries there collected over the course of the last five years. I only bookmark sites that are for some reason important to me, and have some lasting value (eg. I don't bookmark most HN submissions). I tag everything I save and some of my tags have special semantics that is probably only useful to me.
  - codybrown 16y ago
    Updated the question. Thanks.
  - petercooper 16y ago
    Ditto for me but not just over my own links. I don't bookmark everything (though I have 6000 bookmarks there) but if I read an interesting article about, say, bioinformatics and it was something to do with Japan, I could hit up Delicious for articles+bioinformatics+japan and 9 times out of 10, be reconnected to content that Google would struggle to find given the same terms.
- charliepark 16y ago
  Delicious was one of the best resources for finding articles on niche interests, for surfacing articles that were especially good, and for finding others interested in the same topics as you. As for two specific examples: Learning Ruby on Rails has been a long, slow, struggle for me. A number of reasons for that, but one of the main ones being that I don't have many other programmers in my area that I can talk about it with. Although there are scores of blogs and tutorials on Rails, it's hard to know which articles are good, and nobody has the time to read them all. So if I was looking for a post on, say, integrating jQuery with Rails, I could do a quick search at http://www.delicious.com/tag/rails+jquery http://www.delicious.com/tag/rails+jquery, and I'd find a bunch of articles that had been selected by individuals, for their own use. It was great for finding high-quality content. Another example deals with niche interests. Delicious made it easy to suss out who is talking about $randominterest. Just by going to http://delicious.com/tag/randominterest http://delicious.com/tag/randominterest, you can see who else is bookmarking it, who's writing about it, and so on. Especially when dealing with, say, fringe programming languages, or uncommon design details, Delicious makes it easy to find people.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Delicious was one of the best resources for finding articles on niche interests, for surfacing articles that were especially good, and for finding others interested in the same topics as you. I wonder if this could be implemented as an API of websites? (Or perhaps on behalf of websites?) Instead of one single site, you'd have a p2p network of sites using protocols similar to those used for digital cash schemes. Think: a distributed open marketplace of middlemen. A sort of Diaspora middle tier.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Just a side note, but if you're still struggling with Rails, both Zails for Zombies[1] and RailsTutorial[2] are really good. And integrating jquery with Rails is now really easy, since they've moved to unobtrusive Javascrtipt. [3] 1: http://railsforzombies.org/ http://railsforzombies.org/ 2: http://railstutorial.org/ http://railstutorial.org/ 3: https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs
- SandB0x 16y ago
  When I bookmark a niche or obscure page, I can see the handful of other users that have also saved it. Because I can click through to their bookmarks, I often find a wealth of highly pertinent and (otherwise) hard to find links on the topic in question. In other words, the whole social aspect.
- gscott 16y ago
  I will miss Delicious, I would post a link then use Mechanical Turk to have about 80 to 200 other people also post the same link, then the link would be duplicated on other sites that show "popular" links, social aggregator sites would create a "conversation" about the link, etc. Pretty soon you have 100 sites that link back to yours. Now that is all going away.
- metageek 16y ago
  I haven't done much with it lately, but I still maintain a "daily" tag, containing things I want to read every day. I then subscribe to the RSS feed in Firefox, and which gives me a bookmark I can middle-click on to get my daily reading. The main problem was that the RSS feed was limited to 15 entries.
- mvermaat 16y ago
  I've been using Delicious for storage and management of news links on http://checkuitcheckin.nl/ http://checkuitcheckin.nl/ (a view on public opinion on the Dutch public transport card OV-chipkaart).
coverband 16y ago
Why bother with the code? The value is with the existing links database, and since it belongs to the users, Yahoo shouldn't have the right to sell or distribute it freely. Since users can already import/export their bookmarks, the only support Yahoo needs to provide is keeping the import API open for a little longer after the site is shut down. Of course this assumes that users would want to migrate their data to a replacement service.
- bravura 16y ago
  Of course this assumes that users would want to migrate their data to a replacement service. Or, for that matter, that users would share their tags with researchers who build on social tagging data: http://groups.google.com/group/get-theinfo/browse_thread/thread/52b5c35edcc2dafe http://groups.google.com/group/get-theinfo/browse_thread/thr... Here is a (scraped?) delicious data set, for those who are interested: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/116137.html http://arvindn.livejournal.com/116137.html
  - phlux 16y ago
    Why would one want 10-days of bookmarks from 1.5 years ago?
    - simonw 16y ago
      Because they wanted to research how people's bookmarking activity corresponded to new information emerging concerning the 2009 flu pandemic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
- coderdude 16y ago
  Unless I am mistaken here (as far as copyright goes, if that's what you're talking about) the only data Delicious' users can claim any right to is the short descriptions they are able to add to each bookmark. The mere fact that they liked that page is data that can be freely distributed.
  - 16y ago
Void_ 16y ago
Yep, open sourcing wouldn't help anyone. By the way, I think it's written in PHP and Symfony framework. This service just needs to stay alive.
simonw 16y ago
joshu on Twitter: http://twitter.com/joshu/status/15492062459731968 http://twitter.com/joshu/status/15492062459731968 "@cdixon open sourcing it would be an enormous pain in the ass. selling it not as bad but yahoo infrastructure and auth problematic." Besides that, open sourcing delicious wouldn't solve the problem - someone still has to host it, and maintain it, and import several million people's bookmark collections in to it. That takes significant time and money. Having the code is just a small part of it. A smarter thing to do would be to campaign for the (public) data to be released as a huge data dump, ready for people to run their own analysis on (an Amazon Public Data Set for example). This too has plenty of problems though - under what terms should that data be licensed? People's bookmarks belong to them - would they be happy with their contributions being released as part of a massive data set for anyone (including sploggers) to do anything they liked with it?
- abraham 16y ago
  Jaiku seems to be running strong on App Engine so it is possible to open source a large application and have it keep jugging on. I don't see Yahoo being interested in porting to GAE though.
  - apgwoz 16y ago
    Jaiku also underwent a rewrite before being open sourced, and I'm sure their install was given something akin to reserved instances of App Engine. So, yeah, while that's doable, it helps if the company behind it is Google.
- photon_off 16y ago
  I've taken a quarter of a million of the most popular bookmarks from thousands of tags, and created a similarity search engine with it. Seems to be working pretty well. Thank you, delicious.
  - hariis 16y ago
    is it available for public?
thesethings 16y ago
Google has open sourced: Jaiku, Etherpad, Wave among other things, before closing them down. Open sourcing it wouldn't solve the discovery/hosting part, but I still think they should do it. I'm sure it wouldn't be "easy," but it wouldn't be unprecedented. Yahoo! folks also should take a look at dataliberation.org, for best practices on getting on data out (also a Google joint). (Nope, I don't work for Google :D, just think they've done some good things in this space. )
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  s/good/responsible/ Sadly corporate responsibility is not the norm, though it should be.
- rryan 16y ago
  Data liberation is different from open-sourcing. Delicious allows you to dump every bit of metadata about your bookmarks either through their Data Export menu or via their API. Yahoo! did fine with Delicious in terms of data liberation. I imported all my bookmarks into pinboard.in without any trouble at all.
  - thesethings 16y ago
    Definitely agree that data liberation is different that open source, I meant to express them as two separate ideas. Maybe that didn't come across. A bit of data I'd like to get out of delicious that i can't right now, is social stuff/ relationship stuff. It really helped w/discovery. Though you're totally right: link stuff is thorough.
patio11 16y ago
I'm pessimistic: it takes vastly more work to keep it alive, via either OSS or selling, than to kill it. Nobody who Yahoo cares about will notice any news related to Delicious, for fair or foul.
Andrenid 16y ago
I doubt we'll see it open sourced, or saved in any form by Yahoo. It's too much cost/effort for them, when that's the reason they're scrapping it in the first place. What i'd like to see is people quickly rolling out tools that help us get our Delicious bookmarks into other sites easier. Eg into Google Bookmarks. That currently requires you to install the Google Toolbar and import them through that (ugh).
- pjriot 16y ago
  You want a tool to do this job so you can avoid installing google toolbar? How much do you reckon thats worth to you?
  - nmcfarl 16y ago
    I'd say a lot, because to do the import you have to swamp your firefox bookmarks structure with your delicious one, and then import those using the toolbar. Of course this looses all of the tags, and comments, which are pretty much the whole point of delicious. A system that actually gets all the data from delicious into google bookmarks seems to be worth while.
    - kevko 16y ago
      I hacked together something a long time ago to do this with a bookmarklet. It'll import delicious bookmarks into Google while preserving tags. http://blog.lifeslip.com/articles/2006/10/25/bookmarklet-delicious-google-bookmarks http://blog.lifeslip.com/articles/2006/10/25/bookmarklet-del...
      - nervechannel 16y ago
        That worked perfectly! I am hardly able to express how grateful I am :-) It even worked more smoothly than the Google Toolbar's own importer, which complains about dupes (wrongly), and prefixes all the labels with "Tag:" for no good reason. Will blog this ASAP.
bobds 16y ago
I want Open Source Federated Delicious. Anyone wanna help make it?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- kaerast 16y ago
  You know that could just be crazy enough to work. I'd certainly be interested in sitting down and considering architectures with you. I think the keys would be easy import from Delicious, making it friendly for non-geeks and getting the word out that it's the best alternative.
- Macha 16y ago
  I was actually thinking the same thing. Pity I don't have enough time. Though if someone makes a project I'd have to look into helping a little.
  - bobds 16y ago
    A possibility would be to build this on top of Noserub: http://noserub.com/ http://noserub.com/
    - kaerast 16y ago
      There are a few decentralized social networks around. I was considering the use of status.net as a base since it's got a load of the right features in there already (tagging, groups, federation, etc); though it may be best to just start from scratch using new and exciting technologies.
- jchrisa 16y ago
  Done and done: http://blog.fupps.com/2010/05/25/truly-scrumptious-bookmarks-in-couchdb/ http://blog.fupps.com/2010/05/25/truly-scrumptious-bookmarks...
  - 16y ago
alexqgb 16y ago
Since Yahoo! probably wants to avoid the embarrassment of seeing Delicious flourish under different management, they're unlikely to change course here. But having >1,000,000 people with freshly tagged and exported links in a standard format seems to provide an opportunity to those who think they can do better. One request for whoever that is: can you add the 'sort my links by popularity' feature that Yahoo! never developed?
greenlblue 16y ago
There are many alternate services of the same type. Just export your bookmarks into the new service. I don't see what the fuss is about.
- Vic-nyc 16y ago
  Care to provide a few examples?
  - greenlblue 16y ago
    Diigo.
    - mfukar 16y ago
      Notify the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. The word 'many' has been redefined to mean 'one'.
      - greenlblue 16y ago
        'Few' can mean one or more so logically you got nothing. Although if you look up 'troll' you will find 'mfukar'.
        mfukar 16y ago
        You wrote 'many'. Provided 'one'. Now go away.
  - whyleyc 16y ago
    Check out http://favilous.com/ http://favilous.com/
- eli 16y ago
  Because it's not just about my bookmarks -- it's about using the wisdom of Delicious' huge crowd to find quality links on any given topic.
jlft 16y ago
The most valueable assets are its data and brand. I would be suprised if there weren't already similar open source services.
famousactress 16y ago
If they won't, let's buy it. Crowdfund to raise the dough, elect some leadership, and re-start delicious as a little company with six thousand angel investors.
revicon 16y ago
For ppl who haven't exported their bookmarks yet, I wrote a quick webapp to help (for the command line skittish) http://mattcrampton.com/delicious http://mattcrampton.com/delicious
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  For non-command-line-skittish people (on Unix), you can say something like wget --quiet --http-user=`head -n 1 ~/.deliciousrc` --http-passwd=`tail -n 1 ~/.deliciousrc` -O ~/docs/delicious.xml http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all where ~/.deliciousrc is a text file with two lines: yourusername yourpassword (or something similar with curl) I run this out of cron nightly and back up my bookmarks in a git repo, along with my other dotfiles. I really appreciate services like delicious, but I don't trust them. I'm going to miss delicious's data set, though. Searching a really big link collection with tags was great - I found a really good Ethiopian cookbook, some good+obscure research papers, and lots of other stuff that way.
  - d0mine 16y ago
    Using curl: curl -n -o ~/docs/delicious.xml https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all where `-n` flag forces curl to read ~/.netrc file: machine api.del.icio.us login yourusername password yourpassword
    - elementz3000 16y ago
      ok, so did anyone manage to get either the curl or the wget method working? `curl https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/recent` https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/recent` works just fine. `curl https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all` https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all` does not. Maybe a server-side problem?
- kaerast 16y ago
  That doesn't work for newer accounts linked to a Yahoo account. In fact it's a real pain getting your data out in xml format from such an account.
withoutfriction 16y ago
Why not try the Xmarks method? Seeing as a fair number of people are paying for pinboard as a replacement, Yahoo could ask people to commit to paying $10 (outright or per year) to keep their delicious account.
adrianbye 16y ago
why not hand the data over to DMOZ to take care of
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ffffruit 16y ago
Couldn't we do a service where delicious users can export all their bookmarks (bar private ones if they want) and then send them onto a aggregator so a new service can pick up where delicious left. I am assuming here that technically delicious is not (very) challenging, its the data that is precious.
- koenigdavidmj 16y ago
  Delicious already provides an export mechanism. It is up to other services to read that format. http://www.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export http://www.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export
  - ffffruit 16y ago
    I know. What I meant was a service where you put your delicious username and it automatically fetches all your data and merges them into one big dataset. Something to keep the data aggregated and then re-launch.
jamespitts 16y ago
...but only the earlier perl code base :)
nl 16y ago
Pfft. The code is pretty worthless without Yahoo's infrastructure. More interestingly, I wonder how much Yahoo would sell it for?
- joshu 16y ago
  yahoo doesn't actually have much infrastructure that delicious relies on. the main bit is the text indexer.
  - nl 16y ago
    That makes the question of how much they'd sell it for even more interesting.
kloncks 16y ago
The actual code doesn't matter. It's the tens of thousands of man hours that have been spent creating one of the best indexes with careful tags for millions of pages. The data's what makes Delicious matter. And, if you open-source the data, I see people crying foul over privacy.
- larrywright 16y ago
  Not if the links are public, which I suspect most people's are.
ahupp 16y ago
Can anyone recommend a replacement for del.icio.us, ideally one that can import my existing data?
- whyleyc 16y ago
  Check out http://favilous.com/ http://favilous.com/
- hellweaver666 16y ago
  I'm a big fan of http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in
vahidR 16y ago
very good suggestion ...
zeeg 16y ago
Hey Yahoo, or anyone else, please build an open source app so it loses all monetary value.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
UsernameInvalid 16y ago
There is an open source clone of Delicious, Scuttle: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/
illumen 16y ago
I feel sorry for all the people let go just before xmas.
- metageek 16y ago
  Weren't most of them moved to other jobs at Yahoo?
  - apgwoz 16y ago
    not the (reported) 4% of all Yahoo! employees that lost their jobs.
known 16y ago
There should a legislation. If company stops support or goes bust it should open source the software.
- metageek 16y ago
  Open sourcing proprietary software isn't necessarily easy. I was at Netscape when we sanitized the codebase to release as Mozilla, and there was plenty of third-party code that had to be left out. (That's part of why Mozilla was so slow to get off the ground. That, and the fact that compiling Navigator was always a pain in the donkey, even when you had the whole thing.)
- eli 16y ago
  That doesn't really seem practical. What if it uses proprietary technology that the company still wants to retain?
johndbritton 16y ago
Donate it to the Mozilla Foundation.
initpy 16y ago
This is not a copy of delicious, but I wrote this yesterday in a hurry. http://selficious.appspot.com http://selficious.appspot.com - It imported my bookmarks and I use it to manage them and my future ones (add, edit, delete). The code will of course be opensource. I just need to clean it a lil' bit :)
- initpy 16y ago
  All right, the code is online. I'm not really proud of it, but it seems to work just fine. There are tons of features to add/fix and I hope that you'll give a hand: https://github.com/initpy/selficious https://github.com/initpy/selficious
code_duck 16y ago
Is there anything particularly special about the code which would make it interesting? The value seems to be in the concept, and then the content produced by the large user base.

413 points by codybrown 16y ago

We are also compiling stories about present use cases of Delicious. If you are a user, post them here and I'll update the question.

bad_user 16y ago
I've been using it to find interesting links. The difference between Delicious and news aggregators like Reddit / Digg / HN is that the rating of links is a side-effect, not a conscious action. As a result ranking on Delicious does not prefer yellow journalism, obscure interests or vanity displays; much like Google's ranking but small enough to not be a target for promotion through SEO.
- codybrown 16y ago
  Updated the question. Thanks.
adambyrtek 16y ago
I never really cared about the social features. For me Delicious (and now Pinboard) is like a personal knowledge base, supporting my unreliable memory. For example when I want to check my favourite Vim plugins I search for tags vim+plugins+favs. I have more than 2k entries there collected over the course of the last five years. I only bookmark sites that are for some reason important to me, and have some lasting value (eg. I don't bookmark most HN submissions). I tag everything I save and some of my tags have special semantics that is probably only useful to me.
- codybrown 16y ago
  Updated the question. Thanks.
- petercooper 16y ago
  Ditto for me but not just over my own links. I don't bookmark everything (though I have 6000 bookmarks there) but if I read an interesting article about, say, bioinformatics and it was something to do with Japan, I could hit up Delicious for articles+bioinformatics+japan and 9 times out of 10, be reconnected to content that Google would struggle to find given the same terms.
charliepark 16y ago
Delicious was one of the best resources for finding articles on niche interests, for surfacing articles that were especially good, and for finding others interested in the same topics as you. As for two specific examples: Learning Ruby on Rails has been a long, slow, struggle for me. A number of reasons for that, but one of the main ones being that I don't have many other programmers in my area that I can talk about it with. Although there are scores of blogs and tutorials on Rails, it's hard to know which articles are good, and nobody has the time to read them all. So if I was looking for a post on, say, integrating jQuery with Rails, I could do a quick search at http://www.delicious.com/tag/rails+jquery http://www.delicious.com/tag/rails+jquery, and I'd find a bunch of articles that had been selected by individuals, for their own use. It was great for finding high-quality content. Another example deals with niche interests. Delicious made it easy to suss out who is talking about $randominterest. Just by going to http://delicious.com/tag/randominterest http://delicious.com/tag/randominterest, you can see who else is bookmarking it, who's writing about it, and so on. Especially when dealing with, say, fringe programming languages, or uncommon design details, Delicious makes it easy to find people.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Delicious was one of the best resources for finding articles on niche interests, for surfacing articles that were especially good, and for finding others interested in the same topics as you. I wonder if this could be implemented as an API of websites? (Or perhaps on behalf of websites?) Instead of one single site, you'd have a p2p network of sites using protocols similar to those used for digital cash schemes. Think: a distributed open marketplace of middlemen. A sort of Diaspora middle tier.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Just a side note, but if you're still struggling with Rails, both Zails for Zombies[1] and RailsTutorial[2] are really good. And integrating jquery with Rails is now really easy, since they've moved to unobtrusive Javascrtipt. [3] 1: http://railsforzombies.org/ http://railsforzombies.org/ 2: http://railstutorial.org/ http://railstutorial.org/ 3: https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs
SandB0x 16y ago
When I bookmark a niche or obscure page, I can see the handful of other users that have also saved it. Because I can click through to their bookmarks, I often find a wealth of highly pertinent and (otherwise) hard to find links on the topic in question. In other words, the whole social aspect.
gscott 16y ago
I will miss Delicious, I would post a link then use Mechanical Turk to have about 80 to 200 other people also post the same link, then the link would be duplicated on other sites that show "popular" links, social aggregator sites would create a "conversation" about the link, etc. Pretty soon you have 100 sites that link back to yours. Now that is all going away.
metageek 16y ago
I haven't done much with it lately, but I still maintain a "daily" tag, containing things I want to read every day. I then subscribe to the RSS feed in Firefox, and which gives me a bookmark I can middle-click on to get my daily reading. The main problem was that the RSS feed was limited to 15 entries.
mvermaat 16y ago
I've been using Delicious for storage and management of news links on http://checkuitcheckin.nl/ http://checkuitcheckin.nl/ (a view on public opinion on the Dutch public transport card OV-chipkaart).

coverband 16y ago

Why bother with the code? The value is with the existing links database, and since it belongs to the users, Yahoo shouldn't have the right to sell or distribute it freely. Since users can already import/export their bookmarks, the only support Yahoo needs to provide is keeping the import API open for a little longer after the site is shut down. Of course this assumes that users would want to migrate their data to a replacement service.

bravura 16y ago
Of course this assumes that users would want to migrate their data to a replacement service. Or, for that matter, that users would share their tags with researchers who build on social tagging data: http://groups.google.com/group/get-theinfo/browse_thread/thread/52b5c35edcc2dafe http://groups.google.com/group/get-theinfo/browse_thread/thr... Here is a (scraped?) delicious data set, for those who are interested: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/116137.html http://arvindn.livejournal.com/116137.html
- phlux 16y ago
  Why would one want 10-days of bookmarks from 1.5 years ago?
  - simonw 16y ago
    Because they wanted to research how people's bookmarking activity corresponded to new information emerging concerning the 2009 flu pandemic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
coderdude 16y ago
Unless I am mistaken here (as far as copyright goes, if that's what you're talking about) the only data Delicious' users can claim any right to is the short descriptions they are able to add to each bookmark. The mere fact that they liked that page is data that can be freely distributed.
- 16y ago

Void_ 16y ago

Yep, open sourcing wouldn't help anyone. By the way, I think it's written in PHP and Symfony framework. This service just needs to stay alive.

simonw 16y ago

joshu on Twitter: http://twitter.com/joshu/status/15492062459731968 http://twitter.com/joshu/status/15492062459731968 "@cdixon open sourcing it would be an enormous pain in the ass. selling it not as bad but yahoo infrastructure and auth problematic." Besides that, open sourcing delicious wouldn't solve the problem - someone still has to host it, and maintain it, and import several million people's bookmark collections in to it. That takes significant time and money. Having the code is just a small part of it. A smarter thing to do would be to campaign for the (public) data to be released as a huge data dump, ready for people to run their own analysis on (an Amazon Public Data Set for example). This too has plenty of problems though - under what terms should that data be licensed? People's bookmarks belong to them - would they be happy with their contributions being released as part of a massive data set for anyone (including sploggers) to do anything they liked with it?

abraham 16y ago
Jaiku seems to be running strong on App Engine so it is possible to open source a large application and have it keep jugging on. I don't see Yahoo being interested in porting to GAE though.
- apgwoz 16y ago
  Jaiku also underwent a rewrite before being open sourced, and I'm sure their install was given something akin to reserved instances of App Engine. So, yeah, while that's doable, it helps if the company behind it is Google.
photon_off 16y ago
I've taken a quarter of a million of the most popular bookmarks from thousands of tags, and created a similarity search engine with it. Seems to be working pretty well. Thank you, delicious.
- hariis 16y ago
  is it available for public?

thesethings 16y ago

Google has open sourced: Jaiku, Etherpad, Wave among other things, before closing them down. Open sourcing it wouldn't solve the discovery/hosting part, but I still think they should do it. I'm sure it wouldn't be "easy," but it wouldn't be unprecedented. Yahoo! folks also should take a look at dataliberation.org, for best practices on getting on data out (also a Google joint). (Nope, I don't work for Google :D, just think they've done some good things in this space. )

InclinedPlane 16y ago
s/good/responsible/ Sadly corporate responsibility is not the norm, though it should be.
rryan 16y ago
Data liberation is different from open-sourcing. Delicious allows you to dump every bit of metadata about your bookmarks either through their Data Export menu or via their API. Yahoo! did fine with Delicious in terms of data liberation. I imported all my bookmarks into pinboard.in without any trouble at all.
- thesethings 16y ago
  Definitely agree that data liberation is different that open source, I meant to express them as two separate ideas. Maybe that didn't come across. A bit of data I'd like to get out of delicious that i can't right now, is social stuff/ relationship stuff. It really helped w/discovery. Though you're totally right: link stuff is thorough.

patio11 16y ago

I'm pessimistic: it takes vastly more work to keep it alive, via either OSS or selling, than to kill it. Nobody who Yahoo cares about will notice any news related to Delicious, for fair or foul.

Andrenid 16y ago

I doubt we'll see it open sourced, or saved in any form by Yahoo. It's too much cost/effort for them, when that's the reason they're scrapping it in the first place. What i'd like to see is people quickly rolling out tools that help us get our Delicious bookmarks into other sites easier. Eg into Google Bookmarks. That currently requires you to install the Google Toolbar and import them through that (ugh).

pjriot 16y ago
You want a tool to do this job so you can avoid installing google toolbar? How much do you reckon thats worth to you?
- nmcfarl 16y ago
  I'd say a lot, because to do the import you have to swamp your firefox bookmarks structure with your delicious one, and then import those using the toolbar. Of course this looses all of the tags, and comments, which are pretty much the whole point of delicious. A system that actually gets all the data from delicious into google bookmarks seems to be worth while.
  - kevko 16y ago
    I hacked together something a long time ago to do this with a bookmarklet. It'll import delicious bookmarks into Google while preserving tags. http://blog.lifeslip.com/articles/2006/10/25/bookmarklet-delicious-google-bookmarks http://blog.lifeslip.com/articles/2006/10/25/bookmarklet-del...
    - nervechannel 16y ago
      That worked perfectly! I am hardly able to express how grateful I am :-) It even worked more smoothly than the Google Toolbar's own importer, which complains about dupes (wrongly), and prefixes all the labels with "Tag:" for no good reason. Will blog this ASAP.

bobds 16y ago

I want Open Source Federated Delicious. Anyone wanna help make it?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
kaerast 16y ago
You know that could just be crazy enough to work. I'd certainly be interested in sitting down and considering architectures with you. I think the keys would be easy import from Delicious, making it friendly for non-geeks and getting the word out that it's the best alternative.
Macha 16y ago
I was actually thinking the same thing. Pity I don't have enough time. Though if someone makes a project I'd have to look into helping a little.
- bobds 16y ago
  A possibility would be to build this on top of Noserub: http://noserub.com/ http://noserub.com/
  - kaerast 16y ago
    There are a few decentralized social networks around. I was considering the use of status.net as a base since it's got a load of the right features in there already (tagging, groups, federation, etc); though it may be best to just start from scratch using new and exciting technologies.
jchrisa 16y ago
Done and done: http://blog.fupps.com/2010/05/25/truly-scrumptious-bookmarks-in-couchdb/ http://blog.fupps.com/2010/05/25/truly-scrumptious-bookmarks...
- 16y ago

alexqgb 16y ago

Since Yahoo! probably wants to avoid the embarrassment of seeing Delicious flourish under different management, they're unlikely to change course here. But having >1,000,000 people with freshly tagged and exported links in a standard format seems to provide an opportunity to those who think they can do better. One request for whoever that is: can you add the 'sort my links by popularity' feature that Yahoo! never developed?

greenlblue 16y ago

There are many alternate services of the same type. Just export your bookmarks into the new service. I don't see what the fuss is about.

Vic-nyc 16y ago
Care to provide a few examples?
- greenlblue 16y ago
  Diigo.
  - mfukar 16y ago
    Notify the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. The word 'many' has been redefined to mean 'one'.
    - greenlblue 16y ago
      'Few' can mean one or more so logically you got nothing. Although if you look up 'troll' you will find 'mfukar'.
      - mfukar 16y ago
        You wrote 'many'. Provided 'one'. Now go away.
- whyleyc 16y ago
  Check out http://favilous.com/ http://favilous.com/
eli 16y ago
Because it's not just about my bookmarks -- it's about using the wisdom of Delicious' huge crowd to find quality links on any given topic.

jlft 16y ago

The most valueable assets are its data and brand. I would be suprised if there weren't already similar open source services.

famousactress 16y ago

If they won't, let's buy it. Crowdfund to raise the dough, elect some leadership, and re-start delicious as a little company with six thousand angel investors.

revicon 16y ago

For ppl who haven't exported their bookmarks yet, I wrote a quick webapp to help (for the command line skittish) http://mattcrampton.com/delicious http://mattcrampton.com/delicious

silentbicycle 16y ago
For non-command-line-skittish people (on Unix), you can say something like wget --quiet --http-user=`head -n 1 ~/.deliciousrc` --http-passwd=`tail -n 1 ~/.deliciousrc` -O ~/docs/delicious.xml http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all where ~/.deliciousrc is a text file with two lines: yourusername yourpassword (or something similar with curl) I run this out of cron nightly and back up my bookmarks in a git repo, along with my other dotfiles. I really appreciate services like delicious, but I don't trust them. I'm going to miss delicious's data set, though. Searching a really big link collection with tags was great - I found a really good Ethiopian cookbook, some good+obscure research papers, and lots of other stuff that way.
- d0mine 16y ago
  Using curl: curl -n -o ~/docs/delicious.xml https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all where `-n` flag forces curl to read ~/.netrc file: machine api.del.icio.us login yourusername password yourpassword
  - elementz3000 16y ago
    ok, so did anyone manage to get either the curl or the wget method working? `curl https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/recent` https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/recent` works just fine. `curl https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all` https://user:passwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all` does not. Maybe a server-side problem?
kaerast 16y ago
That doesn't work for newer accounts linked to a Yahoo account. In fact it's a real pain getting your data out in xml format from such an account.

withoutfriction 16y ago

Why not try the Xmarks method? Seeing as a fair number of people are paying for pinboard as a replacement, Yahoo could ask people to commit to paying $10 (outright or per year) to keep their delicious account.

adrianbye 16y ago

why not hand the data over to DMOZ to take care of

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ffffruit 16y ago

Couldn't we do a service where delicious users can export all their bookmarks (bar private ones if they want) and then send them onto a aggregator so a new service can pick up where delicious left. I am assuming here that technically delicious is not (very) challenging, its the data that is precious.

koenigdavidmj 16y ago
Delicious already provides an export mechanism. It is up to other services to read that format. http://www.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export http://www.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export
- ffffruit 16y ago
  I know. What I meant was a service where you put your delicious username and it automatically fetches all your data and merges them into one big dataset. Something to keep the data aggregated and then re-launch.

jamespitts 16y ago

...but only the earlier perl code base :)

nl 16y ago

Pfft. The code is pretty worthless without Yahoo's infrastructure. More interestingly, I wonder how much Yahoo would sell it for?

joshu 16y ago
yahoo doesn't actually have much infrastructure that delicious relies on. the main bit is the text indexer.
- nl 16y ago
  That makes the question of how much they'd sell it for even more interesting.

kloncks 16y ago

The actual code doesn't matter. It's the tens of thousands of man hours that have been spent creating one of the best indexes with careful tags for millions of pages. The data's what makes Delicious matter. And, if you open-source the data, I see people crying foul over privacy.

larrywright 16y ago
Not if the links are public, which I suspect most people's are.

ahupp 16y ago

Can anyone recommend a replacement for del.icio.us, ideally one that can import my existing data?

whyleyc 16y ago
Check out http://favilous.com/ http://favilous.com/
hellweaver666 16y ago
I'm a big fan of http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in

vahidR 16y ago

very good suggestion ...

zeeg 16y ago

Hey Yahoo, or anyone else, please build an open source app so it loses all monetary value.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

UsernameInvalid 16y ago

There is an open source clone of Delicious, Scuttle: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/

illumen 16y ago

I feel sorry for all the people let go just before xmas.

metageek 16y ago
Weren't most of them moved to other jobs at Yahoo?
- apgwoz 16y ago
  not the (reported) 4% of all Yahoo! employees that lost their jobs.

known 16y ago

There should a legislation. If company stops support or goes bust it should open source the software.

metageek 16y ago
Open sourcing proprietary software isn't necessarily easy. I was at Netscape when we sanitized the codebase to release as Mozilla, and there was plenty of third-party code that had to be left out. (That's part of why Mozilla was so slow to get off the ground. That, and the fact that compiling Navigator was always a pain in the donkey, even when you had the whole thing.)
eli 16y ago
That doesn't really seem practical. What if it uses proprietary technology that the company still wants to retain?

johndbritton 16y ago

Donate it to the Mozilla Foundation.

initpy 16y ago

This is not a copy of delicious, but I wrote this yesterday in a hurry. http://selficious.appspot.com http://selficious.appspot.com - It imported my bookmarks and I use it to manage them and my future ones (add, edit, delete). The code will of course be opensource. I just need to clean it a lil' bit :)

initpy 16y ago
All right, the code is online. I'm not really proud of it, but it seems to work just fine. There are tons of features to add/fix and I hope that you'll give a hand: https://github.com/initpy/selficious https://github.com/initpy/selficious

code_duck 16y ago

Is there anything particularly special about the code which would make it interesting? The value seems to be in the concept, and then the content produced by the large user base.