9 ms·

YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site

90 points by _pius 12y ago

edj 12y ago
For just straight up bookmarks, Pinboard.in is nearly perfect. -Around $10 for a lifetime membership. -Supports tags. -Great search functionality. -Bookmarklets for most browsers. -Public or private bookmarks. -Lightweight and fast. I've been using it since 2010 and absolutely love it.
- schnevets 12y ago
  I'm currently using Firefox Sync between work and home. There are some issues, but mostly because I'm a compulsive bookmark hoarder. Except for cross-browser support, is there any reason to switch from my current set-up?
  - anu_gupta 12y ago
    - Efficient search, - tagging, - tag specific pages, - if you pay extra, pinboard will crawl the page and save it. Basically, if you ever feel like you'd need to go back and find something you bookmarked a couple of years ago, then yes. If you're just saving a few bookmarks in your browser, then probably not.
  - edj 12y ago
    Well, cross-browser support is a big one for me. I can bookmark from Safari on my iPad or Firefox on my laptop.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    I use Pinboard to read cryptography papers and follow IETF security mailing lists; it allows me to skim large amounts of material, spot anything that might look useful, bookmark it quickly, and move on. I have a browser search engine shortcut so that if I type "pin <something>" into the URL bar, Pinboard will search all my bookmarks and tags and comments and (apparently) full text of the things it's archived, including the full text of PDFs. So, if right now I wanted to find exactly the paper where Rogaway described the powering-up mechanism in the XEX cipher, I can just type "pin rogaway powering" and very quickly have the article in front of me. I'm not sure how I would manage to do that with browser bookmarks. I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search".
    - edj 12y ago
      I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search". Exactly. Pinboard is my personal record of everything online I find useful or interesting enough to remember.
voltagex_ 12y ago
Ah crap. This is a good time to remind everyone to use pinboard.in - the fee is one-time and you can sync from del.icio.us.
- a3n 12y ago
  I am a very happy pinboard user.
thehodge 12y ago
Hmm all I get is the header and footer without any content, for those having a similar issue, Google has it cached : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Adealbook.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F05%2F08%2Fdelicious-social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-founders%2F&oq=cache%3Adealbook.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F05%2F08%2Fdelicious-social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-founders%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1647j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Adealb...
- achairapart 12y ago
  Same here. Although this ugly link seems to work: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/delicious-social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-founders/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Mergers%20&%20Acquisitions&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/delicious-social-site...
programminggeek 12y ago
"But Delicious remains a niche service, with roughly two million monthly active users submitting links." I think this is one more reason to not build consumer apps. You can get millions of people to use something, but it still be considered "niche" or "small" and not really make much money.
- TillE 12y ago
  It's a reason not to make free services. Two million is a huge user base if they're all giving you $10/month. Consumers are willing to pay for value received. I'd certainly pay for a good solution to the mess that is bookmarks, something to complement Pocket. Unfortunately del.icio.us was never quite there.
  - cantbecool 12y ago
    you're delusional if someone is going to pay $10 a month for bookmark software. I could see in the realm of a dollar a month, not $10.
    - regoldste 12y ago
      I agree. I might pay up to $5/month if they offered more than just bookmarking. EG, a powerful and comprehensive platform that automatically organizes the material that a user consumes across all devices. It would be especially valuable if it offered a highlighting service like diigo. I'm not sure how many people would pay $60/annually for such a service though.
      - atto 12y ago
        Check out https://www.kifi.com https://www.kifi.com. I'm an engineer there, so am very biased, but it might be what you're looking for. We're building a full text search engine that integrates directly on Google, so you can find important things super easily. We have on-page contextual discussions (launching early next week: sending a link to any email address, and replies to the email thread show up in the discussion). And we're working on recommendation engines based on your keeps / social connections. Let me know what you think, we're a small team and want to make it the most useful platform as possible.
jlarocco 12y ago
Do people still use Delicious? I thought everybody left after the horrendous redesign... In any case, Pinboard.in is all around better, so I guess the redesign had it's upside.
- AbhishekBiswal 12y ago
  Do people still use *Social bookmarking? Well, for most of the people using the web, Facebook is the common source of news / links / any hot discussion going on anywhere on the internet. Twitter too, but I have read somewhere that generally, Facebook is the only source nowadays.
  - parktheredcar 12y ago
    What would HN, Reddit, etc be classified as if not social bookmarking?
    - twic 12y ago
      I certainly see Delicious and HN as being in the same landscape, but different. Delicious has the concept of friends, so there is a social network aspect to it. HN has comments, so there is a forum aspect to it. I don't have many friends on Delicious, and no friends with really similar interests, so the social network aspect is not worth much to me. HN has lots of reasonably bright and knowledgeable users, so the comments are worth something to me. It's the classic private vs public dichotomy in social networks. If Delicious could somehow mix in some of the forum aspect that HN has, it could become enormously valuable to me. If it let me read and participate in discussions like HN, but focused on the areas i am specifically interested in (more Rust, less Bitcoin), it would replace HN in an instant.
    - mason55 12y ago
      Very crappy social bookmarking maybe. Without tags it's really tough to go back and find anything especially cause 99%+ of the posts are not of interest to me. With delicio.us I just put a bunch of tags on everything I bookmark and then it's super easy to go back and find later.
mrbill 12y ago
I read somewhere that Yahoo refused to sell delicious back to Joshua Schachter when they were looking to ditch it. I moved to pinboard.in when it came out and it's exactly what I need, nothing more, and the guy who runs it keeps it simple. Really loved the sync to import all my existing delicious bookmarks.
- tomek_zemla 12y ago
  Yep... Rooting for the small guy! Hopefully pinboard.in gains some extra users from this.
  - omilu 12y ago
    pinboard to the moon!
- joshu 12y ago
  They approached me after eBay sold stumbleupon back. They wanted way too much.
- jonlucc 12y ago
  Does Pinboard have tags like delicious? That's the number one feature in my opinion.
  - jamesbritt 12y ago
    Pinboard has tags.
- JimWestergren 12y ago
  Thank you for the tip about pinboard.in - I just moved from delicious, it's must better. :)
- sandrae 12y ago
  I migrated from delicious to pinboard.in two years ago and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
weslly 12y ago
I moved to pinboard a couple of years ago and couldn't be happier with it.
izendejas 12y ago
Pinterest is as good an execution of bookmarking (even if not thought about this way) as I've seen. What sets it apart is that content is very visual, organized by content and boards (directories) and easily discoverable. I visited delicious again, and all I see are tags and page titles.
josefresco 12y ago
Delicious is from a different era. I don't know if you all remember, but it was launched and influential when "social" powered sites (see Digg) were all the rage. The most powerful feature of Delicious for me was the /popular/ page, which showed me at a quick glance what sites/pages were trending for that day. Usually it reflected what was on the home page of Digg, and a few other influential tech sites. Moving forward, the idea of user generated content & socially powered websites lost some steam (although the concept is still around) and Delicious lost it's chance to make the site into a profitable force online.
- buckbova 12y ago
  It predates reddit and digg. It had more in common with stumbleupon. I used it for years to store and tag bookmarks so I could share them between machines. But I deleted my account soon after Yahoo took over.
tannerc 12y ago
The announcement from Science is up: http://science-inc.com/about/blog/2014/05/08/welcome-delicious-as-the-cornerstone-asset-of-our-new-data-content-group/ http://science-inc.com/about/blog/2014/05/08/welcome-delicio...
spinchange 12y ago
In its day, Delicious was so great. I especially liked seeing what the rest of my "network" was bookmarking publicly. The UI was no-frills and it was perfect at that. As times changed, I moved on to pinboard.in then largely to storing locally and using Xmarks, to now relying just on Chrome's sync across all devices. It's regrettable that Delicious didn't succeed in the hands Yahoo. At this stage, the owners would probably be best trying to sell to someone or something food-related.
vdm 12y ago
With diigo you can highlight the bits of the page that are actually interesting, as well as tagging.
rexreed 12y ago
I've been a long time Delicious user, and I'm still a Delicious user. I used to use the Firefox browser plugin until that stopped working. But I still continue with Delicious. Why not? It does what I need it to do. But now I feel like I just want a self-hosted version of what Delicious does. I use my bookmarks for my own sake - I really don't care about sharing them with others or discovering new links through Delicious. Should I self host or is there a better option for me? Time to download my links before they disappear, I think.
- Skywing 12y ago
  Chrome's bookmarks auto sync to your gmail account, if you sign in to Chrome. I've been using it to replace Delicious for quite a long time, now.
  - rexreed 12y ago
    But I don't just use Chrome and I want to access my bookmarks not just on my own browser. I want access on all my browsers and in any setting where I wish to reach them. If I was always using the same browser then Chrome would work, but there are times I'm working at a client site and don't have the ability to either use Chrome or sign in to my personal account, yet I wish to access a stored bookmark. This is where Delicious comes / came into the picture... Maybe my use case is different?
- mhurron 12y ago
  > I use my bookmarks for my own sake - I really don't care about sharing them with others or discovering new links through Delicious. That's me, I decided to write my own. One day I'll do it too.
  - rexreed 12y ago
    There's always these: http://readwrite.com/2010/12/17/host-your-own-delicious-altern http://readwrite.com/2010/12/17/host-your-own-delicious-alte...
- voltagex_ 12y ago
gmack 12y ago
Pinboard.in + Delibar = done.
etler 12y ago
The didn't do a very good job during their tenure. As a user all I could tell that they did was re-architect and redesign the site several times without actually pushing the platform forward at all.
- adrianhoward 12y ago
  They also did the ultimate sin - lost a bunch of my bookmarks in the transfer from Yahoo. I had backups - so yay - but it meant I never trusted the service again.
hncosmo 12y ago
putmi.com offers cross device bookmarking. I love the fact I can bookmark from my iphone mobile safari and access on firefox on my desktop

90 points by _pius 12y ago

edj 12y ago

For just straight up bookmarks, Pinboard.in is nearly perfect. -Around $10 for a lifetime membership. -Supports tags. -Great search functionality. -Bookmarklets for most browsers. -Public or private bookmarks. -Lightweight and fast. I've been using it since 2010 and absolutely love it.

schnevets 12y ago
I'm currently using Firefox Sync between work and home. There are some issues, but mostly because I'm a compulsive bookmark hoarder. Except for cross-browser support, is there any reason to switch from my current set-up?
- anu_gupta 12y ago
  - Efficient search, - tagging, - tag specific pages, - if you pay extra, pinboard will crawl the page and save it. Basically, if you ever feel like you'd need to go back and find something you bookmarked a couple of years ago, then yes. If you're just saving a few bookmarks in your browser, then probably not.
- edj 12y ago
  Well, cross-browser support is a big one for me. I can bookmark from Safari on my iPad or Firefox on my laptop.
- tptacek 12y ago
  I use Pinboard to read cryptography papers and follow IETF security mailing lists; it allows me to skim large amounts of material, spot anything that might look useful, bookmark it quickly, and move on. I have a browser search engine shortcut so that if I type "pin <something>" into the URL bar, Pinboard will search all my bookmarks and tags and comments and (apparently) full text of the things it's archived, including the full text of PDFs. So, if right now I wanted to find exactly the paper where Rogaway described the powering-up mechanism in the XEX cipher, I can just type "pin rogaway powering" and very quickly have the article in front of me. I'm not sure how I would manage to do that with browser bookmarks. I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search".
  - edj 12y ago
    I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search". Exactly. Pinboard is my personal record of everything online I find useful or interesting enough to remember.

voltagex_ 12y ago

Ah crap. This is a good time to remind everyone to use pinboard.in - the fee is one-time and you can sync from del.icio.us.

a3n 12y ago
I am a very happy pinboard user.

thehodge 12y ago

Hmm all I get is the header and footer without any content, for those having a similar issue, Google has it cached : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Adealbook.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F05%2F08%2Fdelicious-social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-founders%2F&oq=cache%3Adealbook.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F05%2F08%2Fdelicious-social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-founders%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1647j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Adealb...

achairapart 12y ago
Same here. Although this ugly link seems to work: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/delicious-social-site-is-sold-by-youtube-founders/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Mergers%20&%20Acquisitions&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/delicious-social-site...

programminggeek 12y ago

"But Delicious remains a niche service, with roughly two million monthly active users submitting links." I think this is one more reason to not build consumer apps. You can get millions of people to use something, but it still be considered "niche" or "small" and not really make much money.

TillE 12y ago
It's a reason not to make free services. Two million is a huge user base if they're all giving you $10/month. Consumers are willing to pay for value received. I'd certainly pay for a good solution to the mess that is bookmarks, something to complement Pocket. Unfortunately del.icio.us was never quite there.
- cantbecool 12y ago
  you're delusional if someone is going to pay $10 a month for bookmark software. I could see in the realm of a dollar a month, not $10.
  - regoldste 12y ago
    I agree. I might pay up to $5/month if they offered more than just bookmarking. EG, a powerful and comprehensive platform that automatically organizes the material that a user consumes across all devices. It would be especially valuable if it offered a highlighting service like diigo. I'm not sure how many people would pay $60/annually for such a service though.
    - atto 12y ago
      Check out https://www.kifi.com https://www.kifi.com. I'm an engineer there, so am very biased, but it might be what you're looking for. We're building a full text search engine that integrates directly on Google, so you can find important things super easily. We have on-page contextual discussions (launching early next week: sending a link to any email address, and replies to the email thread show up in the discussion). And we're working on recommendation engines based on your keeps / social connections. Let me know what you think, we're a small team and want to make it the most useful platform as possible.

jlarocco 12y ago

Do people still use Delicious? I thought everybody left after the horrendous redesign... In any case, Pinboard.in is all around better, so I guess the redesign had it's upside.

AbhishekBiswal 12y ago
Do people still use *Social bookmarking? Well, for most of the people using the web, Facebook is the common source of news / links / any hot discussion going on anywhere on the internet. Twitter too, but I have read somewhere that generally, Facebook is the only source nowadays.
- parktheredcar 12y ago
  What would HN, Reddit, etc be classified as if not social bookmarking?
  - twic 12y ago
    I certainly see Delicious and HN as being in the same landscape, but different. Delicious has the concept of friends, so there is a social network aspect to it. HN has comments, so there is a forum aspect to it. I don't have many friends on Delicious, and no friends with really similar interests, so the social network aspect is not worth much to me. HN has lots of reasonably bright and knowledgeable users, so the comments are worth something to me. It's the classic private vs public dichotomy in social networks. If Delicious could somehow mix in some of the forum aspect that HN has, it could become enormously valuable to me. If it let me read and participate in discussions like HN, but focused on the areas i am specifically interested in (more Rust, less Bitcoin), it would replace HN in an instant.
  - mason55 12y ago
    Very crappy social bookmarking maybe. Without tags it's really tough to go back and find anything especially cause 99%+ of the posts are not of interest to me. With delicio.us I just put a bunch of tags on everything I bookmark and then it's super easy to go back and find later.

mrbill 12y ago

I read somewhere that Yahoo refused to sell delicious back to Joshua Schachter when they were looking to ditch it. I moved to pinboard.in when it came out and it's exactly what I need, nothing more, and the guy who runs it keeps it simple. Really loved the sync to import all my existing delicious bookmarks.

tomek_zemla 12y ago
Yep... Rooting for the small guy! Hopefully pinboard.in gains some extra users from this.
- omilu 12y ago
  pinboard to the moon!
joshu 12y ago
They approached me after eBay sold stumbleupon back. They wanted way too much.
jonlucc 12y ago
Does Pinboard have tags like delicious? That's the number one feature in my opinion.
- jamesbritt 12y ago
  Pinboard has tags.
JimWestergren 12y ago
Thank you for the tip about pinboard.in - I just moved from delicious, it's must better. :)
sandrae 12y ago
I migrated from delicious to pinboard.in two years ago and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

weslly 12y ago

I moved to pinboard a couple of years ago and couldn't be happier with it.

izendejas 12y ago

Pinterest is as good an execution of bookmarking (even if not thought about this way) as I've seen. What sets it apart is that content is very visual, organized by content and boards (directories) and easily discoverable. I visited delicious again, and all I see are tags and page titles.

josefresco 12y ago

Delicious is from a different era. I don't know if you all remember, but it was launched and influential when "social" powered sites (see Digg) were all the rage. The most powerful feature of Delicious for me was the /popular/ page, which showed me at a quick glance what sites/pages were trending for that day. Usually it reflected what was on the home page of Digg, and a few other influential tech sites. Moving forward, the idea of user generated content & socially powered websites lost some steam (although the concept is still around) and Delicious lost it's chance to make the site into a profitable force online.

buckbova 12y ago
It predates reddit and digg. It had more in common with stumbleupon. I used it for years to store and tag bookmarks so I could share them between machines. But I deleted my account soon after Yahoo took over.

tannerc 12y ago

The announcement from Science is up: http://science-inc.com/about/blog/2014/05/08/welcome-delicious-as-the-cornerstone-asset-of-our-new-data-content-group/ http://science-inc.com/about/blog/2014/05/08/welcome-delicio...

spinchange 12y ago

In its day, Delicious was so great. I especially liked seeing what the rest of my "network" was bookmarking publicly. The UI was no-frills and it was perfect at that. As times changed, I moved on to pinboard.in then largely to storing locally and using Xmarks, to now relying just on Chrome's sync across all devices. It's regrettable that Delicious didn't succeed in the hands Yahoo. At this stage, the owners would probably be best trying to sell to someone or something food-related.

vdm 12y ago

With diigo you can highlight the bits of the page that are actually interesting, as well as tagging.

rexreed 12y ago

I've been a long time Delicious user, and I'm still a Delicious user. I used to use the Firefox browser plugin until that stopped working. But I still continue with Delicious. Why not? It does what I need it to do. But now I feel like I just want a self-hosted version of what Delicious does. I use my bookmarks for my own sake - I really don't care about sharing them with others or discovering new links through Delicious. Should I self host or is there a better option for me? Time to download my links before they disappear, I think.

Skywing 12y ago
Chrome's bookmarks auto sync to your gmail account, if you sign in to Chrome. I've been using it to replace Delicious for quite a long time, now.
- rexreed 12y ago
  But I don't just use Chrome and I want to access my bookmarks not just on my own browser. I want access on all my browsers and in any setting where I wish to reach them. If I was always using the same browser then Chrome would work, but there are times I'm working at a client site and don't have the ability to either use Chrome or sign in to my personal account, yet I wish to access a stored bookmark. This is where Delicious comes / came into the picture... Maybe my use case is different?
mhurron 12y ago
> I use my bookmarks for my own sake - I really don't care about sharing them with others or discovering new links through Delicious. That's me, I decided to write my own. One day I'll do it too.
- rexreed 12y ago
  There's always these: http://readwrite.com/2010/12/17/host-your-own-delicious-altern http://readwrite.com/2010/12/17/host-your-own-delicious-alte...
voltagex_ 12y ago

gmack 12y ago

Pinboard.in + Delibar = done.

etler 12y ago

The didn't do a very good job during their tenure. As a user all I could tell that they did was re-architect and redesign the site several times without actually pushing the platform forward at all.

adrianhoward 12y ago
They also did the ultimate sin - lost a bunch of my bookmarks in the transfer from Yahoo. I had backups - so yay - but it meant I never trusted the service again.

hncosmo 12y ago

putmi.com offers cross device bookmarking. I love the fact I can bookmark from my iphone mobile safari and access on firefox on my desktop