Earlier today, venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post expressing concern that Web startups tend to languish after they are bought by big companies. To help make his point, Wilson reproduced the comScore chart above, which suggests that the number of people visiting the bookmarking service del.icio.us, which is owned by Yahoo, has dropped off considerably over the past nine months. Wilson was an investor in del.icio.us and profited from its sale to Yahoo in December, 2005. Yet he still laments its apparent struggles under Yahoo’s ownership.
But how bad is del.icio.us struggling really? Yahoo execs always point to it as an internal success story. We asked founder Joshua Schachter, who still runs the service as a Yahoo employee. Despite the stats bandied about by his former investor, Schachter responded by e-mail:
We continue to grow normally.
Unique users is not a good measure of our growth, though.
Much of our traffic is through the Firefox and other browser extensions, which is not measured by these systems.
Additionally, we cut off search indexing several months ago, which also hurts the UU [unique user] numbers.
Since our goal here is not to grow traffic but instead provide a way for people to save things, it’s not something I am really worried about.
That certainly is plausible. Whenever I use del.icio.us I simply save Web pages from the plug-in on my browser, and rarely actually go to the site. I’d estimate that my ratio of saving things to going to the site is 10 to 1, maybe even 20 to 1. As long as people keep saving things to del.icio.us it could prove to be a boon to Yahoo in better search results alone—no matter what the traffic situation is.
But del.icio.us has bigger problems. It has not changed much in years and cannot seem to get its 2.0 version out the door. This despite the fact that Schachter’s team of engineers has been working diligently on improvements since last September. The new version looked like it was ready to go in January, but then the launch was mysteriously pulled. There are rumors that scalability issues were plaguing the project. Hell, it’s been so long that Delicious 2.0 is news again (and, oh yeah, the periods are going away).
While I still do find del.icio.us a useful service, I don’t use it as much as I once did. The Web has evolved and del.cio.us, for whatever reason, has been held back. Here’s to hoping it can push out Delicious 2.0 before Yahoo gets acquired. Because, although Wilson probably won’t be shedding a tear for Yahoo, it is not only small companies that get stifled in acquisitions.
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After an acquisition or sale, you get the cushy factor. There is no more will to succeed. The acquired companies breath a sigh of relief and they feel that they can now afford to sit back on their laurels.
Their startup project has finally turned into a 9-5 job with a secure paycheck.
You know the rest. This is why new startups have a fighting chance. Otherwise acquired startups would dominate forever, and there would never be opportunities for new companies. You actually need people to drop off after being acquired. It’s part of the normal cycle.
They gave a presentation at Xerox PARC a few weeks ago, and I didn’t seem like the design would have an impact scalability. So why don’t they push? I’m not using google bookmarks, along with the yawas extension for Firefox to highlight parts of the web page I’m reading. (disclosure: I did yawas)
Nothing but the truth.
I don’t think Yahoo’s acquisition is really the mitigating factor. Delicious is subject to the same whims of every other social media application. Something else newer and shinier comes along and the mob morphs over to it. There are predictions that even the most recent social media darling, Twitter, may have cracks in its walls. Sooner or later, Twitter will become old hat.
Personally, I use delicious all the time. While I’ve tried Furl, Magnolia and other social bookmarking services, I’ve not found anything else that works as well, for me at least. Delicious is a utility and until I find something else I prefer, I’ll continue to use it regardless of who owns it.
Why would you use delicious to store bookmarks? Why not Google toolbar?
>>Web startups tend to languish after they are bought by big companies
Is there emoticon, anagram, or other internet-friendly shorthand I can type that indicates maniacal laughter turning slowly into spastic sobs of pathos?
Paul Chaney is on point. Users are fickle and we jump to the next new thing. I guess web 2.0 businesses have a super fast growth curve followed by a very quick flatline in growth.
Delicious still gets love from me though…
Raza Imam
http://SoftwareSweatshop.com
I’ve never been a big fan of delicious, and considering how things have evolved since its heyday I’m not surprised it’s falling behind. Whether acquisition is to blame or not I’m not sure, but it could be more a matter of ‘good for its time’ but not really ‘good’ if you know what I mean.
They gave a presentation at Xerox PARC a few weeks ago, and I didn’t seem like the design would have an impact scalability.
What’s an “impact scalability?”
Shouldn’t this story have at least some sort of mention of Diigo … del.icio.us’ most worthy competitor?
We have a great alternative to delicious called Zigtag (using semantic tags) and although we are still in private beta, 90% of the people on our beta signup list have mentioned that they are looking for an alternative to delicious, so delicious might have bigger problems. We hope we are the answer all these people are looking for!
http://www.zigtag.com
I wish the diversity could stay, it’s for all of us good.
Agree that some of this effect is also due to the fact that many of these start-ups are selling at their own natural growth inflection point. If they were truly going to continue growing at their abnormally large growth numbers built off small starting numbers, they’d stay single. But the fact that life goes from sucking the VC dongle to nursing the direct deposit teat also has a lot to do with it as well. Some 20-something who was lucky enough to know HTML and have some unemployed free time in ‘02 an SVP of a multi-billion dollar company does not make. And clearly it’s not like the impacts of these dumbass decisions aren’t effecting Yahoo!s performance is it? Nah…
I don’t really know what Yahoo DOES with del.icio.us. Yahoo does its search, del.icio.us bookmarks and tags, and I can’t tell what the connection is.
Why’d they bother acquiring del.icio.us? As your Techcrunch link to the Jan 2008 post indicates, they may finally be doing something with the tags and bookmarks. There’s an interesting play there for search and discovery.
I was late to the bookmark/tagging party, but I use it a fair amount now. It’s a nice discovery tool. You can get some pretty deep pearls out of there that Google won’t serve up in its search results.
Good stuff
I don’t get why people use del.icio.us. The author himself says he uses a browser plug-in to boookmark pages but hardly visits the site. So what’s the point?
Most people have a limited set of frequently visited bookmarks saved in their browser and for everything else there’s google. With Firefox and the Foxmarks add-on, all my bookmarks are synced automatically between the computers I use.
Someone please explain to me why I should use del.icio.us…
Confused.
Chris, I use the Delicious Bookmarks plug-in for Firefox to keep my bookmarks synced between all the computers I use. This same plug-in provides an incredible degree of integration with the browser, such that I’ve eliminated the traditional browser link bar altogether. Now there’s simply a list of my most visited links in the Delicious toolbar. This list is constantly changing. It’s fluid and based on my real-time usage.
I also use Delicious as a virtual memory. I have more than 1500 bookmarks. And they are all part of a valuable research database that I can access from any computer. I can access this database through the plugin or at the Web site.
Delicious also powers the linkrolls on my blogs. I add a link with a certain tag and it shows up on my blogroll automatically.
I can share bookmarks through friends of mine. FriendFeed, Tumblr, Facebook and any RSS reader can access my main feed. Feeds for each tag (out of thousands) are also available.
There really are a ton of features. Erick hits the nail on the head. The site does need to evolve. But it’s already enormously useful.
I used to use delicious to bookmark my favorites, now I use it for black market search
I prefer stumbleupon.com over delicious now
Del.icio.us bookmarking service is a must have for me. Here’s how I use it:
1. set up a delicious account.
2. install the firefox delicious toolbar and allow it to import your bookmarks from firefox. go to delicious and tag all of your bookmarks according to your own organizational methods. I use tags such as: star, google, tools, reference, torrents, games, employment, comments, etc.
3. be sure to add the TAG button to your firefox navigation toolbar
4. configure the delicious toolbar to show TAG VIEW and in ‘manage tag view’ choose the tags you would like to appear on your delicious toolbar.
5. now each tag will easily display 30 or so bookmarks before you need to scroll and the delicious toolbar will display at least 10 tags, SOOOOO that means you have access to at a minimum 300 bookmarks with one click depending on which tag you click..
6. if you love Firefox’s Live Bookmark feature you’ll love its integration into delicious … just save RSS/ATOM feeds of your favorite sites under the deliciouse tag “firefox:rss” and be sure to add that tag to your delicious toolbar … now delicious toolbar is a feed reader!!! .. that’s not all .. if you use Google Reader you’ll love this: make your google reader tags public, go to the public page for each of your google reader tags and save that page’s ATOM FEED as a delicious bookmark tagged as … can you guess? … “firefox:rss” … now your delicous toolbar will display under one tag “firefox:rss” your entire Google Reader compendium!!!!!
7. as other here have noted, you can also used tags within delicious to feed your blog .. tag your favorites as ‘blogroll’ and then use a delicious badge to display a live feed on your website .. or tag your recent website finds as ‘interesting’ and feed that to your blog..
8. also, each bookmark can be marked private so that no one else will know that you visit a site … but don’t fear.. the delicious toolbar gives you access to your private bookmarks..
There’s more but 1-8 is primarily how I use delicious… got it?
Here’s a screenshot of the delicious firefox toolbar in action:
http://picasaweb.google.com/pa.....7643435138
“I don’t get why people use del.icio.us. The author himself says he uses a browser plug-in to boookmark pages but hardly visits the site. So what’s the point?”
A plug-in that bookmarks the page to delicious.
My god, between that and the rest of your misinformed comment I have to wonder if you’re brain dead.
Del.icio.us is good no doubt. But, it has some user-friendly issues. The biggest problem is it doesn’t allow multi-word tagging for eg. “climate change” needs to be written as climate_change or climate-change or something else (not very comfortable). It has no option for highlighting important lines on the bookmarked pages. Both of these features are offered by Diigo.
Diigo also always easy integration with Del.icio.us such that whenever I save anything in Diigo, it is automatically saved in Del.icio.us too. In Diigo I tag as “climate change” and it is tagged as climate_change automatically in Del.icio.us…I love this feature particularly.
The biggest attraction of Del.icio.us is that it is a very early player in the social bookmarking realm, which translates into a very high number of users. Thus, in the true spirit of social networking and the ilk, presence in Del.icio.us does count! Del.icio.us link rolls are a great feature. I would love to see this Old Boy doing some sort of serious upgrading….until then Diigo makes more sense.
Del.icio.us — great for bookmark management, nice integration with Flock Browser, ad best of all cool way to organize a links page on your site because each topic is updated automatically as you bookmark to Del.icio.us.
for example: http://www.explorehungary.org/links/
It’s just the Yahoo Factor meaning that whenever Yahoo aquires anything it becomes the reverse midas effect they turn anything they touch stone, i.e Broadcast.com, Flickr, Delicious and on and on!
Oh well, i hope yahoo buys my company =)
Paul Chaney is on point. Users are fickle and we jump to the next new thing. I guess web 2.0 businesses have a super fast growth curve followed by a very quick flatline in growth.
Delicious still gets love from me though…
Like a remind:
Fred Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York in 1954, and lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from SUNY/Purchase.
http://www.site-aanmelden.com/.....index2.php
Delicious is same as it was as earlier, I think they should add some interesting feature like the way digg is doing something new.
I would have to say Diigo is the future as well.
I used to use del.icio.us, but then got bored waiting for Delicious 2.0 and started experimenting with other services. I’ve been using the new version of Diigo for the last few weeks and, for once, it’s a tool that pretty much does everything I want it to do, plus doing a whole lot more that I hadn’t even known I wanted. I was sold on the annotating and highlighting web pages part, but then there’s the “unintentional social network” thing, the bookmark cache and much more. Definitely the future, not just for bookmarking.
You said on the post that
“The Web has evolved and del.cio.us, for whatever reason, has been held back.”
I became curious on what should del.icio.us evolve to… Any hint?
I use del.icio.us (via web interface) a lot and love it.
Cheers from Brazil!
this post was added to http://www.tectrnd.com
set your trnd now!
cheers
what i love about this company aside from the great tool is that they use a .us domain. i hope more entrepreneurs will be so bold!
Del.icio.us is great — for their browser plugin. For everything else, Diigo is superior.
I still use del.icio.us on a daily basis and rarely visit my bookmarks.
Well, there are those of us who visit the del.icio.us website a lot. After all, when you have ~9000 bookmarks its minimal no-nonsense interface, feeds and most of all, tagging feature can change the way you organize and retrieve information. Other competitors may be more shiny or hip or even have more features (Blogmarks’ automatic previews or Unalog’s privacy or others’ caching of the page content) but as far as scalability, robustness and day to day usefulness, well delicious has proven itself quite a few times as I’m concerned. And I think I’m not the only one happy user, given Schachter’s response…
nda
I’ve since switched my bookmarking to using a site called http://phonefavs.com as it works like a mobile version of delicious, which they still do not seem to offer.
I love del.icio.us, tried diigo but always came back to del.icio.us for the simple interface and because all my friends use it.
I think Joshua Schachter may be right when he says “Unique users is not a good measure of our growth”. The strength of del.icio.us lies in its API, RSS feeds, bookmarklets and plugins. It does not have to compete with diigo or Google bookmarks, it has to compete with Ctrl+D. So far, it’s winning.
good nice
@EH impact on scalability, sorry I wrote too fast my comment. I mean that the new UI didn’t look like it would stress their backends more than the current UI would. So what’s stopping them?
I think I’m not the only one happy user
Delicious has more users. This is its only advantage over Diigo. But times are changing. Diigo is the facebook of social bookmarking. No more to say.
nice answer from yahoo explaining the slump in the traffic,
translation –> heading to the deadpool
Del.icio.us is perfect and if they are going to make a new version I hope all the novelty is essential to the core idea. If it is going to be another social networking attempt then I’m out.