I’ve been mulling over the big blow-up over Yahoo! ‘sunsetting’ Delicious, the immediate mass exodus to Pinboard, and what that means for me as someone who never used Delicious for saving bookmarks, but for finding what others are linking to. Matt Haughey writes:

[…] like Twitter, on Delicious you choose your followers and once you find a couple dozen amazing web surfers marking up interesting out-of-the-way places before anyone else does, you might find like me that the /network/ feature of Delicious is a killer once-a-day visit that often leads to half a dozen interesting finds.

That usefulness is evaporating since the overnight flight to Pinboard, a paid-for service that for me isn’t worth the money if I won’t be using it for its primary purpose.

I’ve made the best of things, reconstructing a sizeable chunk of my network manually thanks to the brilliant Delicious-to-Pinboard username mapper and saving the individual RSS feeds to a folder in my reader of choice. Inelegant but practical.

But there’s still the question of why people were/are so willing to give up on Delicious so quickly. It’s not going anywhere for the time being, no-one’s data is going bye-bye, all the utility is still there. Nothing has really changed apart from some corporate dictum proclaiming that the service will be offloaded at some point in the future.

Maybe it’s just the uncertainly that sent users scurrying like rats from the Titanic. But it’s the hastiness that leaves a bad taste. I wonder, is it worth investing in any web service if the mere threat of the rug being pulled sends everyone fleeing to the nearest alternative?

Answers on a postcard, please.

Thu 30 Dec 2010 at 19:37   ·