It looks like your (and my) personal search engine of interesting web pages is about to go away. Yahoo hasn’t formally confirmed, but all signs point to the impending demise of delicious.com.
What are we going to do with all of our bookmarks?
There are several alternatives available and, if you’re like me, you’re going to have to test some of them out until you find the one that best fits how you like to save bookmarks and later search for them. You’ll also want to export your existing delicious.com bookmarks and, if possible, import them into the new service you choose. Instructions on that are below, but first, here’s a list of options for your post-Delicious.com bookmarking.
10 Delicious.com Alternatives
(in alphabetical order)
Blinklist: Blinklist has some of the same features that Delicious has, like quick bookmarking and sharing with others. Pages can be read offline, as well. But … there doesn’t appear to be a way to import bookmarks, so this is probably a non-starter for existing Delicious.com users.
Connotea: The site advertises itself as a service for “researchers, clinicians, and scientists.” And many of the features are specifically designed for academic users. But it acts in much the same way Delicious does: find a web page, add it to your “library,” add keywords for later retrieval, and so forth.
Diigo: Diigo lets you save web page bookmarks, files, images, and much more. It bills itself as a personal information management service. You can bookmark web pages via a Diigo toolbar and/or a bookmarklet in your web browser.
Evernote: Like Diigo, Evernote isn’t just for bookmarking web pages — but that’s one of the things you can do, and I know a few fellow search marketers who are already using Evernote instead of Delicious. You can save URLs or just text clippings from a web page.
Faves.com: This is not a pure bookmarking site, but a site that acts as a combination of, say, Delicious and Google Reader. When you register, Faves.com installs its toolbar in your browser and that’s how you save content. Your Faves.com home page includes the links that friends have saved (if you choose to connect to others who use the site), making it as much about content discovery as saving.
Google Bookmarks: You may already be using this without even knowing it. If you’ve ever starred a search result on Google.com or starred a place in Google Maps/Places, it’s already been saved into Google Bookmarks. You can also add sites to Google Bookmarks via the Google Toolbar. In fact, here’s a list of the various ways to add pages to Google Bookmarks. And yes, it supports importing bookmarks.
Historio.us: This bookmarking site even has a .us TLD like Delicious.com used to have. Histori.us offers one-click saving, makes snapshots of web pages when you save them, offers tagging and full-text search. It does support importing bookmarks from other sites. There’s a limited free account option, but if you have more than 300 bookmarks, you’ll need to use one of the paid accounts.
Instapaper: If you’re a heavy Delicious.com user, this one’s probably not for you. Instapaper allows you to save web pages for reading at a later time, but creator Marco Ament warns that it’s not “optimized for keeping track of thousands of pages. This isn’t the right tool to collect, categorize, tag, filter, and search the contents of every web page you’ve ever found.”
Pinboard.in: This is not a free service. It offers a basic service for about $7 (one-time fee) or an archival service for $25 a year. The archival service stores copies of your bookmarks and provides full-text searching. Conveniently, you can see a Pinboard vs. Delicious comparison to help you decide if this is the right service for you.
Zootool: Like some of the others above, Zootool isn’t just for URLs; you can save images, documents, and other web-based content. Saving is done via a bookmarklet and, unlike Delicious.com’s blue links, Zootool saves your content as thumbnails. It offers organizing tools like tagging, too.
How to Export Delicious.com Bookmarks
You’ll probably want/need to export your Delicious.com bookmarks in order to get the most out of any of the services above. I’ve mentioned cases where importing is or isn’t available, at least based on the sites’ help pages.
Fortunately, exporting Delicious bookmarks is easy:
1. Login to Delicious and go to your “Settings” page.
2. Under the “Bookmarks” heading, look for the “Export / Backup Bookmarks” link.
Delicious will save your bookmarks as an HTML file, and you have the option to include your existing tags and/or notes.
Your turn: If there are other Delicious.com alternatives that I’ve missed above, or if you have experience with any of the sites above (good or bad), let us know in the comments so that all readers can benefit.
Postscript (December 17, 2010)
See our new post indicating Delicious.com may not be closing down: Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All.
Related Topics: Features: General | Top News | Yahoo: Delicious
I was in panic mode upon hearing the news of Yahoo!’s plans to euthenize Delicious.
I began using Diigo today. Pinboard markets their service as “antisocial bookmarking” – no thanks. However, this may prompt me to once again start using Evernote regularly.
Found a comparison between Diigo and Delicious:
http://iisquared.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/diigo-and-delicious/
Thanks for the list, Matt!
I created a pinboard account (basic service) today, haven’t explored it much as I’m waiting for my delicious bookmarks to be imported. There are apparently hundreds of users trying to do this at the same time.
As to the tagline of being antisocial, what online isn’t?
With Delicious shutting down, I want to recommend everyone try YourVersion http://YourVersion.com. With YourVersion you can import both your Delicious bookmarks and tags. YourVersion is a real-time discovery engine that lets you discover, bookmark and share tailored web content (news, blogs, webpages, tweets and videos) by your specific interests. I invite you to try it today!
I’ve used Diigo in the past when it first came out, seems like a good alternative to the ‘mighty’ delicious. I honestly don’t think this is the end of it, too many loyal users and too much data. Someone with deep pockets (MS, Google) can come in and save our day. Or we, the loyal users, can crowdfund it!
Thanks for the great list Matt.
One alternative that I have started using recently is SpringPad http://www.springpadit.com . It is very similar to Evernote in that you can create notebooks and save many different types of content. There is also a planning section of the app that allows you to create tasks, projects, lists, etc. Personally, I like the interface of SpringPad better than Evernote. Also, the Chrome extensions/ & app offer convenient access to tool. Thanks.
Favbot offers automatic import and free hosting for Delicious bookmarks. Once imported, you can use your bookmarks just like before except for the small change in the url http://www.favbot.com/import-delicious.html
You should check out the other features of Favbot too : http://www.favbot.com/ – it makes manual bookmarking obsolete, actually. The tool automatically bookmarks for you. It even crawls the links you shared on Twitter etc.
I’m curious to know what you think about it.
Another interesting alternative is http://licorize.com a new bookmarking service which offers the possibility to import your bookmarks from Delicious.
Another possibility is Trailmeme http://trailmeme.com (created by some of my colleagues at the Xerox Research Center Webster, so I’m not unbiased), which lets you organize bookmarks and connect them as “Trails”. It’s sort of mind-mappy. They posted instructions on how to import from Delicious: http://blog.trailmeme.com/2010/12/delicious-give-us-your-tired-your-poor-your-huddled-masses/
Hi
There is also another alternative: http://www.licorize.com
Here you can easily import your bookmarks from Del.ici.ous. It’s not as intuitive as Del.ici.ous but it works :-)
One more alternative, from Silicon Hills: @KeepStream – social media curation… come see them at SXSW Interactive in 2011
Another tool that could be interesting is http://trunk.ly
It’s pretty new, I’m testing it right now, doing good…
http://www.oneview.com/ with firevox addon ,onclick save button,deliciousimport tags
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneview
After I heard the news yesterday about Yahoo’s plans to let D.e.l.i.c.i.o.u.s ride off into the sunset I knew I needed a substitute. I decided on Diigo and it is pretty awesome. I love the fact that you can tag cutouts of pages with markup…
There is also FAVable. It’s a bookmarking website that focuses on being more of a visual experience. http://www.favable.com For example you can see some bookmarks I have created on FAVable here… http://www.favable.com/bookmarks/index.asp?uid=391779869794#388285326957
Which of these bookmarking services captures links from tweets and tags them automatically? Or are there third-party services doing this a la tweecious for delicious? I use the delicious/tweecious combo so that I can retrieve links I tweet, sort them by tags, etc.
the slight annoyance about using Google Bookmarks is that by default it does NOT import TAGS which are all so important for Delicious power users. This solution by Andy Hitchman http://bit.ly/googledelicious ALLOWS tag import which in Google are called Labels. Thereafter you can use a Chrome extension to effectively sync the Bookmarks locally eg. http://sites.google.com/site/uniformedopinion/
Let’s hope an official solution and improvement to Google Bookmarks happens.
I use xmarks.com for its compatibility with almost all the major browsers and their web interface is simply superb. ~
Hopefully it’s not closing despite the nice news shut off the blog, http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-delicious.html
Future are mobile apps like Instapaper. Instapaper can save you lots of time and ubiquitous. Importer I’ve build makes this transition – from delicious bookmarks to instapaper:
http://bit.ly/delicious2instapaper
Hey, solid list. There’s another service called wonderpage available at http://wonderpage.com . It does everything favbot does and more. You can share your bookmarks directly on twitter or facebook and even have a feed with latest bookmarks from your friends. Last but not least there’s a snapshot of each page made for you. It’s still in beta and we have some interesing updates coming.
A perfectly timed article! Thanks. I’ve got THOUSANDS of tagged links in delicious – while searching for stuff I’ve found online is nice, where I get a lot of value out of it is RSS feeds for tags and searches. For example, on my blog in the “Art of Presenting” category, I show results for that tag at the bottom. It’s an extra layer of value I can offer readers. Not sure what’s going to replace that.
Here’s a simple way to import all your Delicious bookmarks with tags into Google bookmarks:
http://andyhitchman.github.com/DeliciousToGoogleBookmarks/
XMarks – allows importing from Delicious and sharing of bookmarks. They were just bought by LastPass – so they are likely on the upswing.
I’m astonished sometimes when bloggers don’t bother to do the simplest research before writing something that’s incorrect. Regarding blinklist:
“But … there doesn’t appear to be a way to import bookmarks, so this is probably a non-starter for existing Delicious.com users.”
When you sign up for a blinklist account, you can click the settings icon at the bottom of the screen, and there’s clearly an option titled “import from delicious”. Also, see here:
http://blinklist.com/user/join/step-2#
hm… i only use delicous and stumble upon. but notice stumble has been rather slow lately. thanks for the alternatives.
“I’m astonished sometimes when bloggers don’t bother to do the simplest research before writing something that’s incorrect.”
Why the distinction of using the word, “bloggers”? This is a general, easily observable behavior by the overwhelming majority of all writers, in all media.
There’s also the issue of someone who professes to be “astonished” at an event as common as finding oxygen in the atmosphere… But some spiritualists encourage being in a state of constant astonishment, so perhaps that’s your point.
Another good alternative is http://www.vizited.com. This service organizes you bookmark as thumbnails. You can add tags, filter and search, keep the bookmarks private or share them on Twitter and Facebook. You can even share a collection of bookmarks with your friends or clients.
With the Firefox plugin you can even bookmark your websites without having to login to vizited.com.
You can’t import your bookmarks here, but for me that’s a good thing. This gives me the chance to filter out the garbage I’ve been collecting over the last years. A lot of websites I collected where not even existant anymore. I can now make a new start…
They’re still in beta, but the service runs like a charm since 3 years. They listen very carefully to imput and feedback from the users and keep updating the service based on this.
And the best thing? It’s free. ;-)
I leave you with a delicious alternative that seems interesting: http://www.flinkin.com
I am using http://truffls.com as an alternative to delicious. It’s is very simple and easy to use. If your desire is just want to keep \your\ urls saved, truffls.com is a very good place.
Give Linkpager a try!
http://www.linkpager.com
Save And Share Your Internet Favorites. Keep your bookmarks in the cloud to be accessed from any web-enabled location like your computer, your phone, home, work, or away. Keep your links private or share with the world.
Saving your favorite places has never been so easy and accessible.