So goodbye Del.icio.us, we hardly knew you.
Yesterday, Yahoo! took the decision to take a few of its less successful products and acquisitions out behind the chemical sheds to be shot. Although the list includes Yahoo Buzz, AltaVista, MyBlogLog (sniff) and a few others - the euthanaising of Delicious has sparked by far the biggest outcry among the social media brethren. Therefore, Twitter exploded in talk of petitions, howls of derision, complaints and general wailing and gnashing of teeth. After all, the same people who adopted Delicious years ago are often the same people who dived headlong into Twitter.
Will anyone else really notice? To be honest, I don't think the story is that Yahoo! is somehow being backward thinking. If anything it is just more confirmation that online behaviour has evolved beyond the bookmarking heyday that saw Digg, Delicious and Reddit become influential powerhouses. Social bookmarking has been on a downward trend for a while - really only championed by those who developed their habits 2-3 years ago. Newbies venturing online and wanting to share or bookmark content have far more - and better - alternatives available now. Would my daughter ever see a need for Delicious? Would yours?
Talk about the rapid decline of Digg has been widespread for a long time and their October redesign managed to only speed up its freefall into obscurity. At its height, Digg boasted 40 million unique users per month. Yet, as Hitwise reported back in September, the much touted redesign saw the steady decrease in usage turn into a steep cliff on the graph. But Digg has been in trouble for a while. 10% of staff were axed early in the year and another 37%(!) got unwelcome cheques last October, as reported by Neowin.
What is interesting about the Digg implosion is that other bookmarking sites such as Reddit didn't see a corresponding rise. Not everyone merely switched their allegiances elsewhere. Reddit has definitely had a good year, most likely on the back of competitor failures. But it isn't all roses there either, with financial trouble threatening its future. Earlier this year it took the unusual step of actually asking for donations from users to help with the necessary resources to keep the Conde Nast-owned operation running smoothly. Not surprisingly, this did not go down too well with those who thought Conde Nast should fund their own properties.
Of course, Delicious, Reddit and Digg aren't entirely synomymous with each other. Digg is all about the sharing of interesting links to reach a wider audience whereas many Delicious users claim they primarily wanted the service to merely provide universal access to bookmarks from any device - a personal link archive. Although that is no doubt the case, the social part of social bookmarking definitely dropped away in recent times. I dropped Delicious as a bookmarking option on my blog a loooong time ago as it was so rarely used. Many others I note have done the same, or continue with widgets that display a big fat zero while the Twitter and Facebook buttons tick over and over. back in 2007-2008 I was an active participant on Digg, but saw it gradually becoming too much work for too little gain.
The dramatic rise of Twitter, the introduction of Facebook 'Like' and so on has created far more effective ways of sharing interesting content with more people in a more engaging way. This has gradually seen Digg and Delicious (and many others) become increasingly less effective and more redundant. Plus, there are also more alternatives to help organise bookmarks and make them accessible from anywhere.
Personally, I couldn't live without Xmarks and Instapaper. Xmarks is a Chrome and Firefox plugin that allows me to sync my bookmarks from any browser I have it installed. Instapaper lets me save and archive links with a simple click for me to access later - including offline, once I've synced. Both of these suit me far better than Delicious ever did. But if someone has developed their behaviour around Delicious, I can see why it would be a wrench to find alternatives.
Truth is, social bookmarking is fading rapidly. If you are looking to share content, networks like Twitter and Facebook (and, to an extent, StumbleUpon) do it far better. If the goal is to make cloud-based bookmarking simple, there are may superior options now available. Still, familiarity breeds emotional attachment. I think there will be more foot stomping and loud complaints before Delicious fades away and we all move on to whatever's next.
