Delicious[1] (stylized del.icio.us) was a social bookmarkingweb service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.[1][2][3] Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011,[4] and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year.[5] In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc.[6] In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.[7]
In June 2017 Delicious was acquired by Pinboard, and the bookmarking service was discontinued.[8]
Functionality
Delicious used a non-hierarchical classification system in which users could tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag was available; for instance, the URL http://delicious.com/tag/wiki displayed all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature made it possible to view bookmarks added by other users.
Delicious also allowed users to group links with similar topics together to form a "Stack", and include title and descriptions for the Stack page.[9] Stacks could be worked on collaboratively with other users, and could be followed and shared with other users. Stacks were added in September 2011 and removed in July 2012.
Delicious had a "hotlist" on its home page and "recent" pages, which helped to make the website a conveyor of Internet memes and trends. Users could also explore stacks on the home page by navigating categories such as Arts & Design or Education.
All bookmarks posted to Delicious were publicly viewable by default, although users could mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks were private by default. The public aspect was emphasized; the site was not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections.[citation needed] Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature could be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.[citation needed]
History
The old logo of Delicious
The precursor to Delicious was Muxway, a link blog that had grown out of a text file that Schachter maintained to keep track of links related to Memepool.[10] In September 2003, Schachter released the first version of Delicious.[11] In March 2005, he left his day job to work on Delicious full-time, and in April 2005 it received approximately $2 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures and Amazon.com.[12]
When Delicious was first launched, it was the first use of the term "tag" in the modern sense, and it was the first explicit opportunity where website users were given the ability to add their own tags to their bookmarks so that they could more easily search for them at a later time.[13][14] This major breakthrough was not much noticed as most thought the application at the time "cool" but obvious.
Yahooacquired Delicious on December 9, 2005.[15] Various guesses suggest it was sold for somewhere between US$15 million and US$30 million.[16][17] In 2018, Schachter said the actual number was "definitely less" than US$30 million.[18]
On December 16, 2010, an internal slide from a Yahoo meeting leaked, indicating that Delicious would be "sunsetted" in the future, which seemed to mean "shut down".[19] Later Yahoo clarified that they would be selling Delicious, not ending it.[20] This news resulted in Delicious users looking for alternative sites. This benefited Pinboard, also a bookmarking site, which saw a huge surge of traffic and activity on its site.[21] Various other services such as Google Bookmarks and Spabba also offered bookmarks migration tools to allow users to migrate and safeguard their bookmarks out of Delicious.[22][23]
On April 27, 2011, Delicious announced the site was sold to Avos Systems, a company created by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.[24] Unbeknownst to members, Yahoo continued to operate the site until September 2011.
On September 26, 2011, Delicious launched its completely new version 3.0 design in beta.[9] This redesign came in as a surprise to many of its users, with many features being disabled, removed or temporarily unavailable.[25] AVOS Systems removed the Delicious Support Forum and had advised users that communication with Avos should take place via email. Reaction from users was overwhelmingly negative.[26][27]
On November 9, 2011, AVOS Systems announced that they had acquired the link-saving service, Trunk.ly.[28] Trunk.ly offered to automatically save all links that users have "liked" on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This acquisition led to the launch of Twitter Connector on Delicious on March 2, 2012.[29]
On May 8, 2014, Science, Inc. announced it had acquired the Delicious website from AVOS, without acquiring staff.[6] Science, Inc. is a "technology investment and advisory firm", which said it intended to keep the site "largely as is".[30]
On January 11, 2016, the Delicious blog announced ownership had transitioned to a new company formed between Science and of Domainersuite.[7]
On June 1, 2017, Pinboard acquired Delicious. The service was shut down and became read-only on June 15, and its users have been encouraged to subscribe to the Pinboard service.[31]
As of July 15, 2020, Maciej Ceglowski, owner of Pinboard, announced plans to restore the site to a explorable state and allow data export provided users have their login credentials.[32]
Under Avos Systems
After being purchased by AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011, Delicious went through significant UI redesigns and became more social.
On September 26, 2011, Delicious launched its completely new version 3.0 design in beta. Delicious added a new feature called Stacks that allows users to group multiple related links into a single page, and customize the Stack by adding title, description and a featured image.[9]
On December 13, 2011, Delicious continued its work to redesign its site, including UI changes to link-saving page and Stacks page.[33] The new design, especially for the Stacks page, was similar to the design of another popular social photo-sharing website Pinterest.[34]
On January 20, 2012, Delicious added more social features into its Stacks page, allowing users to collaborate on the same Stack, as a public Stack or a private Stack among a group of users.[35] The users can also comment on a stack and create a stack as a response to the original stack. This new social feature was considered as a good step against competitor such as Pinterest which did not offer private boards at the time.[36][37]
On March 2, 2012, Delicious continued its effort to be more social, by providing a Twitter Connector that allows users to connect their Twitter accounts to their Delicious accounts. This new feature allowed tweeted links to be automatically saved into the Delicious account.[29]
On July 20, 2012, Delicious reversed its position on the Stacks feature. All Stacks created by members were converted to tags in early August, 2012, without any loss of member data. This was part in response to AVOS's direction for Delicious and partly from feedback from Delicious members, many of whom felt that Stacks were trying to emulate features of the visual bookmarking site, Pinterest.[38]
Name
The "del.icio.us" domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase.[39]
In an interview Schachter explained how he chose the name: "I'd registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words. In early discussions, a friend referred to finding good links as 'eating cherries' and the metaphor stuck, I guess."[40]
On September 6, 2007, Schachter announced the website's name would change to "Delicious" when the site would be redesigned.[41] The new design went live on July 31, 2008. In January 2016, changes to the website were announced, including a move back to "del.icio.us".[7]
On April 24, 2016, Delicious transitioned back to "del.icio.us".[42]
The original incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. was an American multinational technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early internet era in the 1990s. Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, served as CEO and President of Yahoo from 2012 until June 2017.
Memepool was a multiple-author weblog, active from 1998, that listed links to interesting, obscure, weird, or funny items on the web along with a bit of commentary. Items often included multiple links with contents that conflict or comment on each other, similar to the sarcastic stylings of Suck.com.
Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, allowing users to organize their bookmarks and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.
Joshua Schachter is an American entrepreneur and the creator of Delicious, creator of GeoURL, and co-creator of Memepool. He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system, although they may also be chosen from a controlled vocabulary.
LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book metadata. It is used by authors, individuals, libraries, and publishers.
Google Bookmarks was an online bookmarking service from Google, launched on October 10, 2005. It was an early cloud-based service that allowed users to bookmark webpages and add labels or notes. The service never became widely adopted by Google users.
Feedburner, Inc. is a web feed management service primarily for monetizing RSS feeds, primarily by inserting targeted advertisements into them. It was founded in 2004 and acquired by Google in 2007.
Pageflakes was an Ajax-based startpage or personal web portal similar to Netvibes, My Yahoo!, Myhomepage, iGoogle, and Microsoft Live that operated from 2005 until January 2012. The site was organized into tabs, each tab containing user-selected modules called Flakes. Each Flake varied in content; information such as RSS/Atom feeds, Calendar, Notes, Web search, weather forecast, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, social networking tools like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, email and user-created modules. Pagecasts allowed users to share their pages publicly, allowing them to share a curated page of content that would be of interest to others .Pageflakes had 250,000 Flakes and over 130,000 Pagecasts.
Simpy was a web-based personal and social bookmarking service.
Xmarks, formerly Foxmarks, is a defunct bookmark synchronization add-on for web browsers. The add-on was developed by San Francisco-based company Foxmarks which was founded in 2006 by Mitch Kapor and was acquired by LastPass in December 2010.
Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags and how often they are applied or searched for, in contrast to a taxonomic classification designed by the owners of the content and specified when it is published. This practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy was originally "the result of personal free tagging of information [...] for one's own retrieval", but online sharing and interaction expanded it into collaborative forms. Social tagging is the application of tags in an open online environment where the tags of other users are available to others. Collaborative tagging is tagging performed by a group of users. This type of folksonomy is commonly used in cooperative and collaborative projects such as research, content repositories, and social bookmarking.
AddThis was a free social bookmarking service that could be integrated into a website with the use of a web widget. Once the widget was added, visitors of a website using the service could bookmark or share an item using a variety of services, such as Facebook, MySpace, Pinterest, and Twitter. AddThis collected users' behavioural data, even if they do not share anything. The site reached 1.9 billion unique visitors monthly and was used by more than 15 million web publishers. The service operated under companies including AddThis, Inc., AddThis, LLC, and Clearspring Technologies, Inc. until the company's acquisition by Oracle Corporation on January 5, 2016. AddThis would continue to run until all services were terminated on May 31, 2023.
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information like recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. Created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, Pinterest, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco.
Pocket, previously known as Read It Later, is a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. Released in 2007, the service was originally only for desktop and laptop computers and is now available for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Kobo eReaders, and web browsers.
Instapaper is a social bookmarking service that allows web content to be saved so it can be "read later" on a different device, such as an e-reader, smartphone, or tablet. The service was founded in 2008 by Marco Arment. In April 2013, Arment sold a majority stake to Betaworks and by mid 2016 Pinterest acquired the company. In July 2018, ownership of Instapaper was transferred from Pinterest to a newly formed company Instant Paper, Inc. The transition was completed on August 6, 2018.
Pinboard is a social bookmarking website developed and run by Maciej Cegłowski. It has a plain design and a focus on personal management of bookmarks using tags to organize them, similar to early versions of the Delicious social bookmarking service.
MixBit was a video sharing service created by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, two of the co-founders of YouTube. It was released on August 8, 2013. MixBit let users create dynamic shared videos, and competed with Vine and Instagram in the video sharing website market. Its iPhone app was released in August 2013 and its Android app followed two months later. MixBit ceased operations on August 21, 2018.
Maciej Cegłowski is a Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic, based in San Francisco, California. He is the owner of the bookmarking service Pinboard, which he calls a social bookmarking site for introverts.
↑ Schonfeld, Erick (December 9, 2005). "But is it del.ove.ly?". CNN. Archived from the original on May 18, 2018. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
↑ Swearingen, Jake; Schachter, Joshua (October 18, 2018). "Did I Make a Mistake Selling My Social-Media Darling to Yahoo?". Intelligencer. Archived from the original on October 21, 2018. Retrieved October 22, 2018. I'm fairly sure that "$30 million" is just journalist code for "We have no information; here's our guess." That's the published number, and it's a wild guess. The actual number is under NDA. It probably doesn't matter now, since Yahoo isn't even really a company, but it was definitely less than $30 million.
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