It’s been over nine months since Yahoo first gave us a glimpse of Delicious 2.0 – a complete code rewrite from the now aging platform that was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005.
Yahoo never said when they’d be ready to launch the new Delicious (it’s available at preview.delicious.com but beta invitations are locked down). In January there was a hint on the Delicious blog that the new version was coming soon: “We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious. We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.” But no update came, and since then, not a peep from Yahoo.
It’s now been nine months. We’ve heard from Yahoo insiders that founder Joshua Schachter is now working on another project, and now that his stock has fully vested it isn’t even certain he’ll stay with the company. Meanwhile, scaling issues have confounded the Delicious team and they continue to rework the architecture.
In April venture capitalist/blogger Fred Wilson noted that the user numbers for Delicious were dropping. Schachter told us that the Comscore numbers did not reflect their business, saying they continue to “grow normally.” He also pointed out that a large number of people use the service via Firefox and other browser plugins, and that the service shut off search indexing, hurting unique traffic numbers.
Delicious is still my social bookmarking service of choice, but Delicious 2.0 is a serious black eye for Yahoo and the Delicious team. It’s time for them to update us on when we can expect a general release of the next version.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
You’re right. Good call. It’s also surprising that they haven’t even opened up the beta to tech bloggers eager to get their hands on it and provide feedback. It’s just been completely quiet. Del.icio.us “works”, but it could be _much_ better.
In the same way that bloglines decision to rewrite from scratch has killed their site (no innovation so users have been flocking to the better Google Reader instead) this will probably kill delicious.
Either they bought a lemon or they made the wrong call here. Code doesn’t go “rusty” or degrade. It should improve over time, not fall apart.
Why did Google take away the PageRank of all the Users homepages?
For me, Google Reader killed del.icio.us when it launched Notes for my shared entries in Google Reader. From that time, I stopped using del.icio.us to bookmark pages and I started using Google reader Notes. Much better. All my shared content in one feed
del.icio.us is one of the best web 2.0 sites but looks like a web 1.0 site.
Just today I was thinking that short url redirectors are picking up more interest that del.icio.us. Our own .CR domain accepted even 1 letter registrations and there are plenty of 2 letter domains still available!
How about TechCrunch using te.cr/… instead of tinyurl.com/…? 140 characters is not a lot!
As I read this article, I can’t help but to thin, “why does it need updating?”
Rewrites are a tricky thing for any piece of software. For a thriving product it means managing new feature developments with old feature re-development. The sad thing is that most rewrites don’t focus on bridging the two technologies so it can be managed, and instead focus entirely on the new architecture leaving the product to become stale. It’s hard but bridge and balance is probably the right way to go for competitive software.
Sorry, I’ve already switched to ZigTag – much more productive for me.
I wish Yahoo would experiment a lot more with convergence of their many excellent 2.0 items. For example mashup a sort of mail-seeded friendfeed with Flickr, Delicious, IM, mail. Seems to me the big players are missing some amazing opportunities to use their huge footprints to dominate social media.
Yup its still a good bookmarking site. But Yahoo was betting on it morphing into a social search engine with tags at the core of a new ranking algo.
That hasnt happened, so in terms of the ‘Great Game’ it’s kinda irrelevant.
What I’d like to know is how does Delicious make money and why did Yahoo buy them again?
I don’t understand why we have to wait for a new update of Delicious.
If Yahoo don’t care about its property, we have also to do the same…
There are many new bookmarking services [Diigo etc] that give us more features than delicious…
Catch the next wave…
Elaborating, what could be more social bookmarking than the URL’s sent through Twitter? That might be a better direction.
How about this for a TC headline?
“Lo.cr (pronounce it ‘locker’) combines del.icio.us social bookmarking with tinyurl.com’s short redirectors. Instead of asking for keywords, it picks the most frequent significant words from the twit where the URL was sent and uses them as a tag. This entry for example can be found as a short url as lo.cr/yaddayadda (compare to tinyurl.com/yaddayadda) or using del.icio.us keywords as lo.cr/techcrunch/del.icio.us (compare to del.icio.us/techcrunch/del.icio.us)”
Let me hold on to this post so that if it happens I can say I thought about it first.
R
i agree with robotics, yahoo could have probably invested in a more lucrative venture
Elaborating, what could be more social bookmarking than the URL’s sent through Twitter? That might be a better direction.
Joe hunkins, I couldn’t agree more on the principle.
however unifying all of these great services would take time and resources. 9 months. that doesn’t seem long for a project of this magnitude, although from a user perspective it sounds an eternity, especially after it was announced.
there was a document a couple of months ago about an experimental graphical interface that was very compelling, but I can’t retrieve it
There are clearly high expectations given del.icio.us reload has been going on for so long. I’ve got high hopes for something impressive (http://tinyurl.com/6b64pg) but I would not be surprised if it was something less inspiring.
I think the bigger and more interesting story is how del.icio.us has stayed pretty much the same since it was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. If Yahoo was so keen to buy del.icio.us, you would have thought there would have been more integration – unless, of course, it was a defensive move.
Shouldn’t bookmarks be handled centrally by the operating system? I’m thinking like the global address book of OS X. Of course syncing to an online service and/or multiple computers would be useful.
The star and search system in FireFox 3 looks great.
Yes it is true but i think that in future and in order to aggregate we could only use Delicious instead of blogs, tumblr. What do u think?
Michael,
why wait for delicious 2.0 when Diigo 3.0 is already out and way better? Plus, we are moving towards Diigo 4.0 already
Because Diigo is ugly as fuck, unusuable and generally has features that no one wants or needs.
As a fairly heavy user, I’m not exactly holding my breath for 2.0. del.icio.us stumbled upon an awesome mix of functionality, and frankly I fear that any (heavy) tampering would rather make it worse.
There’s obviously a lot of innovation potential on top of del.icio.us; but does that really have to come from Yahoo?
The one thing I’d really like to see is del.icio.us uncrippling its API. Currently, the request limits are draconian.
delicious works pretty well as it is, I don’t see the point of messing with it.
the fact that it’s a bit clumsy and not as shiny and happy as some other systems tends to mean for me that the content is more interesting on the whole. less seo-happy, fewer cancerous internet memes, no dancing bananas. boring, actually. which makes it endlessly fascinating.
Peter,
a lot of people seem to disagree with you on diigo.
see http://www.diig...iigo-v3-reviews
i personally like diigo a lot though i think it needs to go beyond the scope of research and/or education which seems to be a focus of a lot of its users (and that’s completely cool). as far as delicious goes, they just need to make it look nicer and perhaps offer some better functionality when it comes to the organization and editing features.
The elephant in the room here is the degree to which this underscores the execution challenges facing Yahoo. (As a MSFT shareholder, it also pleases me that the acquisition didn’t occur.)
The idea that YHOO can’t get a feature like Delicious innovated and updated, despite supposedly working on it, highlights a lack of execution focus. Perhaps they’re just not working on Delicious anymore, but in that case, then they should just let folks know. Setting an expectation of a 2.0 release and then going silent is worst of both worlds, sets a terrible example of lack of execution focus.
As a delicious fan, I hope they update their plans and execute against them.
The preview is a bit on the disappointing side, there are some improvements but there also seems to be plenty of bits they’ve missed out too e.g. delete from inbox
I just don’t think anyone cares about del.icio.us anymore which is sad ‘cos I love it.
so mike is now the armchair ceo of both twitter AND delicious.
You do not have to wait any longer. With Diigo (http://www.diigo.com), who needs Delicious 2.0?
I have Delicious 3.0. It’s the “send to Del.icio.us” feature in Diigo. I get all of the robust features of Diigo and can still update my delicious account. I haven’t logged into delicious in about 3 months, maybe that helps explain why their numbers are languishing.
This site is crap. It takes like 60 seconds for the ads and junk to load.
I hope that the next version includes more powerful functionality, but keeps the simple, minimalist, uber-functional design.
The last thing the delicious community (e.g. geeks) want is a shiny new redesign.
I have to admit that for a while I was wondering the same. del.icio.us is really one of the coolest 2.0 apps out there and really defined how people organize data and use tags on the web. There have been a flurry of hints and whispers about a “2.0″ product for a while now but nothing solid has come.
With that said, to say that del.icio.us is stale is just plain wrong. If you havn’t noticed there have been a lot of small integrations with the rest of Y! (my blog log, etc) and several really heavy releases of the firefox extension and now IE extension. MA is this your way of passive aggressively asking? Or maybe you’ve run out of twitter complaints and need something else to bitch about.
Whine, whine, whine. Arrington hasn’t been updated so it’s time for the giant cigar smoking baby to throw another tantrum at Yahoo.
As for comscore numbers going down – are you seriously doubting their explanation? Every person I know uses the Firefox plug-in and rarely (if ever) goes to the site.
All the Diigo employees need to be banned from TechCrunch for their obvious spam.
I got an invite to the preview way back in October 07. Just logged in and it hasn’t changed a bit in all this time – at least on the front end anyway.
The user interface is awful. It really does look like something put together by a committee of programmers rather than something designed from scratch by an experienced interface designer.
Some of the extra functionality is an improvement but delicious has been well and truly left behind by its competitors.
I switched to diigo a while back – so far so good. It was an easy transition to make since diigo allows me to also post to delicious so I have a foot in both camps.
delicious/popular is still a url I visit regularly and I follow a number of people in my delicious network. Unfortunately though, it does seem that Yahoo are prepared to let delicious wither on the vine. The current preview of 2.0 is nowhere near prime-time and it looks doubtful if it ever will be.
I’m not a diigo employee by the way. diigo has its faults. It also lacks the tech/internet user base that I like to follow. But at least it’s being developed.
Wade,
of course you’d list positive reviews on your site.
Nice spamming of TechCrunch. That desperate for users eh?
I don’t know what all this diigo hating is about. Their version 3 really is awesome. I remember that diigo sucked when I first saw it on TC–not sure if that was v 1.0 or 2.0–but right off the bat it was so horrible that I recall being almost traumatized by the experience. Everything felt counter intuitive or something. I don’t really remember.
Have you diigo haters used v 3.0? It’s just plain awesome. That’s all I can say.
My only major problem with it is the crappy name & logo. Too easily confused with Digg. Not sure that it would be worth trying to change the name at this point though.
I guess the site’s aesthetics leave a little something to be desired too–mainly from a clarity / intuitiveness standpoint.
They need a really good UI person to write some new CSS for them. An additional color needs to be worked in there somehow…
Add Upcoming to that list. Since Waxy left it after the Yahoo acquisition it has pretty much gone stale, save for a Web 2.0 restyling that left it twice as slow, some integration with Flickr (Yahoo Calendar? Nope!) and reversions back to pre-Yahoo (better) functionality.
Half these comments are “why use Delicious when [insert name of competing product I am shilling for] is so much better?”
I think delicious is seriously lacking a few features, intuitive navigation for one. Delicious is basically a blob of tags and hastily organized data that is strewn together with a web 2.0 buzzword and a massive unorganized userbase. Will someone please take there userbase, please, someone has to build something better than delicious for link archival. For heaven sakes I would rather use dmoz, and that is from Netscape days. A big middle finger to yahoo for not making delicious was it should be, someone will take the delicious crown.
The beauty of del.icio.us is its simplicity. I attempted to leave once for Ma.gnolia.com, but came back because del.icio.us was just far simpler and worked more efficiently for me. While I am occasionally interested in browsing and searching others bookmarks, I simply want a central bookmark repository in the cloud that is browser independent. Del.icio.us gives me that. Who needs a rewrite of the site or a new version? It’s not broken, so don’t fix it.
Unfortunately, the cat’s out of the bag now, so there’s no turning back and saying never mind. I can only hope that Yahoo! doesn’t ruin the site by turning it into yet another failed attempt at a social network.