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Yesterday Yahoo announced it is cutting some of its products in a money saving effort. The products include Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, AllTheWeb.com, Yahoo Picks, and AltaVista. In addition, there will be some consolidation of other products like Fire Eagle and Upcoming. NetworkEffect has a more complete list of products that will be dropped or merged.
But that was yesterday.
One would think Yahoo! knows it only takes one tweet and a few milleseconds to create a global news sensation. The announcement about Delicious did just that. Now, 24 hours later, Yahoo! steps up with an announcement on its blog that Delicious won't be dropped, merely shopped around for a new home.
The news that Delicious would be dropped –- termed "sunset" by Yahoo! -- sent users into a tizzy. Alternate bookmarking sites have been slammed with people trying to migrate their bookmarks before it's too late. I have this mental image of Yahoo! grabbing all the Delicious users and swinging them around by the tail for 24 hours before dropping them in a vat of cotton candy.
The Yahoo! blog is down, but ReadWriteWeb managed to grab the entire statement saying Delicious will live on. Here's part of it.
Many of you have read the news stories about Delicious that began appearing yesterday. We're genuinely sorry to have these stories appear with so little context for our loyal users. While we can't answer each of your questions individually, we wanted to address what we can at this stage and we promise to keep you posted as future plans get finalized.
The post also assured users that Delicious would continue to operate, but more news would be coming in the future about its fate.
ReadWriteWeb also published the leaked slide that got the whole firestorm started yesterday, clearly showing Delicious among the services to be sunset.
Why did Yahoo! wait so long to reassure its users that there was no need to panic? In the face of articles explaining how to find alternate bookmarking sites and pleas on Twitter to open source Delicious, Yahoo! said nothing. Now the tweets may become satirical slams.
The corporate lessons learned from this event by Yahoo! and others who are operating in social media will be interesting to watch as the dust settles.
Want to Get Off Delicious Anyway?
There are sites that can take care of your Delicious bookmarks for you.
- You may already be using the popular note-taking product Evernote. If you are, that's a logical place to start. Evernote provides directions for Making the transition from Delicious to Evernote.
- Beth's Blog mentions a service that many are turning to in RIP: del.icio.us. That service is Diigo. Diigo looks like an excellent choice. According to Diigo's Transition from Delicious to Diigo instructions, Diigo will preserve tags, private vs. public bookmarks, follow bookmarks from other people, post your bookmarks to your blog and even do some things you couldn't do with Delicious.
- Another widely recommended service that will allow you to import from Delicious is Pinboard. There are several links on the Pinboard home page relating to Delicious. So many people are turning to Pinboard that there's also an announcement that imports are running a little slowly, but they are running. There's a one-time sign up fee for Pinboard of $8.18.
- The already well-established bookmarking site Mister Wong is another good option. The Mister Wong Blog gives directions for how to do an import from Delicious.
- Historious is free for up to 300 bookmarks. For unlimited storage, it's $19.95 a year. It claims migration from Delicious is easy and that tags, titles, and dates remain intact.
- A service that I've seen recommended is Zootool. Right now, the site is down to work on import infrastructure to handle all the Delicious traffic that's hitting them. They should be back in operation soon. Zootool is supposed to be a bit like Tumblr in that it saves visual content, too.
- Spabba Gives Your Delicious Bookmarks a New Home at TechCrunch announces a new product created preserve Delicious bookmarks. Spabba is new and there's no indication as to whether information like tags will be preserved, so approach this one with caution.
Features to Check For
The sites I mention above have variations of what they do for you. For example, some
