Introduction Of “Stacks”

The biggest change released is the stacks functionality that allows users to group links into easy to consume “stacks.” Previously, tagging was the only form of effectively grouping links on Delicious. Making a stack is simple, just create a name, write a quick description and toss some links in… Delicious will do the rest. Thumbnails are auto-filled, and you can select a headline image from a variety of images that Delicious pulls in from your links. Then publish to the community.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The great thing about the stacks is that users can share more comprehensively than by bookmarking a single link. For example “Everything You Need To Know About HTML5 Audio and Video” is a stack that compiles a variety of HTML5 links with descriptions of each, while “Cocktail-Ready Infusions” simply keeps track of a user’s favorite drinks. A stack can be created around an infinite number of user interests.

Enhanced Imagery & Media

Gone are the days of pages and pages of light blue links on Delicious. They have been replaced with large thumbnail images, creative displays and media. The homepage now features vivid images from a variety of stacks, and stacks themselves feature large header images. Stacks can also display video directly on Delicious, enabling video lists. For example, a user into video games created “My Top 12 Favorite Live-Action Videogame Commercials” and “Epic Awesomeness: 11 of the Best Live-Action Videogames Films,” both video-only stacks.

Overall, the new Delicious is showing quite a bit of promise, and they are listening to all of the feedback that is coming in, so expect even more enhancements in the near future!

From the press release put out by AVOS, the company run by the duo (note, you might not get to the release, as the AVOS site appears to have crashed):

Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company….

Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

Discovery & Search

OK, “discovery” isn’t exactly the same as search. Discovery tends to be about serendipity. You come across interesting things even if you’re not actively seeking them out. Search is an on-demand activity. You need an answer. You search. Think the Facebook newsfeed (discovery) versus Google (search).

Still, it’s interesting that the two — in their post-Google lives — are jumping back into a space so heavily related to their former company. Well, the former company (Google) which bought the company they founded (YouTube). Chen left YouTube in July 2009; Hurley in October 2010.

Delicious Moves In July

As for the future of Delicious, Yahoo will transition by July of this year. Also from the release:

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

“We spoke with numerous parties interested in acquiring the site, and chose Chad and Steve based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious,” said John Matheny, SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo!

The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

The delicious blog said:

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.

Providing a seamless transition for users is incredibly important for both companies. Yahoo! will continue to operate Delicious until approximately July 2011. When the transition period is complete, your information will be moved over to Delicious’ new owner.

Starting today, we will ask you to login to Delicious again and agree to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks to the new owner. That way, you’ll enjoy uninterrupted use of the service and will keep your account and all of your bookmarks when we make the transition. For more information on the Delicious transition, please refer to this FAQ.

Thank you for your patience in this time of transition and thank you for using Delicious!

Related Stories:

• Confirmed: Yahoo Closing Buzz, Traffic APIs – Maybe Delicious & AltaVista
• Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All
• Yahoo, You Flubbed News About The Future Of Delicious, Not The Press
• Yahoo Makes Delicious.com Cool Again
• 10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking
• Delicious Founder Schachter Departs Google

Yahoo “Disappointed” Over “Little Context”

On the Delicious Blog today, Yahoo writes:

Many of you have read the news stories about Delicious that began appearing yesterday. We’re genuinely sorry to have these stories appear with so little context for our loyal users….

We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We’ll let you know more as things develop.

Yahoo Itself Gave No Context

Well, my goodness! A story started going around that Yahoo might be closing Delicious. Several news outlets, including Search Engine Land, asked Yahoo if this was true. What were we told? This:

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.

See anything about Delicious there? Nope. Not a word. Nothing like, “We plan to sell it to someone else” or “No, we’re not going to close it” or any of that context that Yahoo is now whining that the press somehow failed to provide.

Time To Threaten, But No Time To Clarify

Maybe Yahoo didn’t have enough time to react as it should have. Well, the news hit Twitter at 10:29am, according to the time stamp that Google reports:

About 45 minutes later, Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving stepped in, as the retweeting and discussion kicked off on Twitter. Did he provide any context, which in turn would have almost certainly been retweeted and perhaps calmed the nerves of loyal Delicious users?

Nope. Instead, all Irving did was harp about the leak and threaten to fire the leaker:

Irving’s since tweeted exactly once since then, about an hour ago, to complain again about leak and to suggest it got things wrong needlessly:

Reason leaks suck? They’re rarely right. This wrong one caused a shit storm. This has been the plan for months: http://yhoo.it/hrirji

What, Exactly, Was Wrong?

Let’s dissect that. The leak suggested that Delicious would be a “sunset” product, which implied it could be closed or perhaps sold to a new company. In fact, that’s exactly what I wrote in my story about the leak yesterday, having to work without any clarification from Yahoo:

But it’s a terrible mistake to have let the news leak out this way. I think it’s just going to create doubt among those loyal users about the future of their bookmarks, what do they do next and whether it’ll be closed permanently, closed to new users or — hopefully — shepherded to a new company that will maintain it.

Others wrote similar summaries. So what exactly was “wrong” other than — of course — Yahoo making a mess of things?

Moreover, if this has been “the plan for months,” then Yahoo could have said everything it put out in its blog post today yesterday, when the news broke. Instead of crying about a lack of context. It could have provided that context itself, when it was most needed. It failed to do so.

As a result, Yahoo — not the press — generated all this worry that it’s now apologizing to Delicious users about.

When Asked Specifically, No Comment

Let me go back to our own questions to Yahoo. We saw the news making the rounds. We emailed Yahoo about the slide and whether Yahoo was closing the “sunset” properties. We did this at 11:29am Pacific Time.

Now to be clear, we would have run the story even if we hadn’t had the Yahoo response. Often, big companies are slow to respond to rumors — or just don’t at all. As a media outlet, you try to weigh up how likely a rumor seems to be. If you do go with one, you try to provide the best context you can around it.

As it happened, we got a response shortly before we posted our story. That response came in at 12:13pm — about 45 minutes later after we asked. We got the statement I quoted at the top of this story.

The statement said nothing about Delicious. So, I went back at 12:28pm with a follow-up question. Was Delicious part of the shutdown plans?

At 12:40pm, I got back this response:

We’re not commenting on Delicious specifically at this point.

That’s two different ways Yahoo failed to get “context” out about Delicious — both through Irving’s tweet and through its formal public relations channels.

Nice Job, Yahoo — You Devalued Delicious

Here’s some unsolicited advice for Irving. If you’re the chief product officer — and you’re going to tweet — then the next time you see something going around about one of your products that you think is incorrect, say so. Otherwise, stay off the channel. Certainly don’t break in to complain after the fact that everything was wrong when you and your company failed to communicate properly.

I’m with Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch about this. Yahoo just seems in disarray, as he wrote earlier today. This is yet another sign of that. Moreover, this disarray has massively devalued a company asset that Yahoo now hopes to sell.

Consider this snapshot of the most popular items being shared on Delicious today:

Multiple items explaining how to get out of Delicious are currently popular on Delicious. Our own 10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking story was at the top of the list, and it has been our most read story here at Search Engine Land for nearly a day now.

By the time Yahoo gets around to selling off Delicious, there might be few people left actually using it. That’s all due to Yahoo’s own ineptness, in assuming product news wouldn’t leak and in not being prepared in case of such a leak to communicate clearly that the service’s near term future wasn’t in doubt.

In a post today on the Delicious.com blog, the company emphatically says Delicious isn’t closing.

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

- No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

- We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.

Those are strong statements of Yahoo’s intent to find a buyer for Delicious, but they’re also a different message than what appeared on the “Sunset slide” used in an internal webcast for Yahoo employees:

Given the widespread disappointment (and anger) that spread online yesterday at the thought of Delicious.com being “sunsetted,” Yahoo should have plenty of options to explore. Delicious.com clearly has a strong and vocal userbase, perhaps stronger and more vocal than Yahoo’s decision-makers realized.

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.

News is traveling fast about a leaked slide from a Yahoo “all hands” meeting earlier this week that listed several products — including Delicous and AltaVista — to be “sunsetted.” Yahoo confirms that Yahoo Buzz will be closed, as will the Traffic APIs. Delicious seems likely to go, too.

Here’s the statement we received from Yahoo:

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.

I asked again if this included Delicious and was told:

We’re not commenting on Delicious specifically at this point.

The Sunset Slide

The news appears to have been broken first by Eric Marcoullier, who tweeted out a picture from an internal slideshow that was given to Yahoo employees:

You can see a larger version of this here. Marcoullier was previously a Yahoo employee, having come over when Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog — a service he cofounded. Several Yahoo employees seemed to confirmed the image via Twitter, as AllThingsD reports, as did Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, when he tweeted about firing the source of the picture:

Can’t wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone!

Goodbye To Yahoo Buzz

As you can see, Yahoo Buzz is on the list of “sunset” products, those that will be closed. When Yahoo Buzz launched in Feb. 2008, it took over the name from a previous trends-based product and was positioned as a type of new Digg with close links to publishers.

So Long, AltaVista & AllTheWeb

Also on the list are AltaVista and AllTheWeb. Both are search engines that Yahoo inherited from Overture, which in turn bought the services in 2003. AltaVista used to be a giant of the search world but has long since been eclipsed by Google. Neither gets much traffic, though both have links from across the web. Indeed, all those links still keep AltaVista ranking well on Google for searches on both “search engine” and “search engines.”

Closing those services makes sense to me, in that they don’t offer anything that Yahoo doesn’t already offer. These days, they’re both powered by Bing — as is Yahoo. The only reason to maintain them is for the extra “shelf space” they get from across the web. If they’re closed, and redirected to Yahoo, the traffic will be maintained in the short term. In the long term, some of that legacy traffic will finally disappear.

See You, MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog enjoyed a brief rise of fame as a social widget that could be installed on your blog. Yahoo bought it in 2007, and Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog & More On How It Works is our article on how it worked at the time. I found it soon became pretty spammy and stopped using it, myself. These days, I think it’s fair to say that Facebook Connect and the “friend” widget it allows has left MyBlogLog behind. I won’t miss it, for one.

Coincidentally, Marcoullier has a sequel to MyBlogLog that just came out in beta testing today: OneTrueFan.

What’s Next For Delicious?

As for Delicious, I’d say it’s one of the survivors of the social bookmarking world. It continues to have a strong, loyal following. I can see Yahoo making a hard decision that it’s not feasible to maintain, for some reason. But it’s a terrible mistake to have let the news leak out this way. I think it’s just going to create doubt among those loyal users about the future of their bookmarks, what do they do next and whether it’ll be closed permanently, closed to new users or — hopefully — shepherded to a new company that will maintain it.

Postscript by Matt McGee: In that last sentence, Danny is wondering what many Delicious users are also wondering: Would or could Yahoo sell Delicious? Could it give Delicious over to the community as open source code? There was a quick conversation about that on Twitter a little while ago between Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon and Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious (who sold it to Yahoo in 2005). Schachter told Dixon that both scenarios are probably unlikely:

Could the loyal Delicious community step in somehow? Just a couple months ago, the community came together when news spread about the demise of Xmarks — a popular web browser bookmark syncing tool — with many volunteering to begin paying for what had been a free tool. Three days later, Xmarks announced that interested buyers had come forward and Xmarks would be saved.

There’s an obvious and huge difference between Xmarks and Delicious: One was owned by a spunky, little startup. The other isn’t.

Postscript #2: See our related article, 10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking.

Postscript #3: See our new post indicating Delicious.com may not be closing down: Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All.

Sure, SEOs and online marketers have continued to appreciate the value of getting a bookmark on the Delicious “Popular” page, but regular users will appreciate today’s upgrades. They involve a new take on hot/fresh bookmarks, new sharing features, and improved search functionality. Here’s a look.

Twitter-based Fresh Bookmarks

The most obvious upgrade is a new tab on the Delicious.com home page called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Yahoo is so sure of the value of this new tab that it replaces the old “Popular Bookmarks” as the default view on delicious.com.

The web pages listed here use a new algorithm based both on what delicious.com users are bookmarking and what Twitter users are talking about. Each page listed includes a “Recent Tweets” indicator that can be clicked to see who’s-saying-what about each topic.

Yahoo says the pages listed on this new tab will use factors such as the number of delicious.com bookmarks and tweets, and those tweets don’t even need to include the URL of the bookmark. There’s an obvious concern over noise and spam anytime you bring Twitter data into such a bright spotlight. Delicious will need to watch this closely.

The links on this new tab will come mostly from the technology, web, politics, and media categories, Yahoo says. For regular users, this could be a welcome change of pace from the web design-heavy content that usually shows up on the Popular tab. But others are sure to prefer the old home page. It would be nice if users could choose which tab they see by default.

What’s Yahoo using to power this? Well, you may recall my article earlier this year about Tweetnews, a mashup that uses Twitter conversations to rank articles appearing in Yahoo News. That was a pet project of Yahoo’s Vik Singh, and this is its first official use on a Yahoo-based product.

Improved Sharing

Delicious gets a little more social with a new “Send” tab that shows up when you’re saving a bookmark.

It was always easy to send bookmarks to your Delicious network, but this tab now includes options to send the link to Twitter and/or send it to friends via email.

New Delicious Search Options

Perhaps the most functional addition is an improved search engine inside Delicious itself. Delicious now shows suggested searches, a “filter by tag” option, and a timeline-based chart that reveals when pages matching your keyword have been saved. This last feature makes it an important indicator of what you could call Delicious.com Trends.

The new search results page will sometimes include rich content, too. In the screenshot above, you can see two bookmarks of YouTube videos — those videos can be watched inline without leaving Delicious. Yahoo says other content, such as Flickr images and Yelp local data, will also show up in its search results when appropriate.

Final Thoughts

It’s tempting to write off Yahoo in light of the recent search deal with Microsoft, but the reality is that the company still owns some of the crown jewels of their online space. Flickr and Delicious are two of those, for sure. Yahoo bought Delicious back in 2005, and in the intervening years has made few improvements — a redesign last summer, along with minor things like better browser extensions and web site badges. Along the way, Yahoo lost Delicious founder Joshua Shachter to Google, too.

So, these announcements should be welcome news for all delicious.com users — a course reversal, almost. Delicious isn’t dead. Yahoo’s still paying attention to it. And all of a sudden, it’s cool again.

The old de.licio.us:

The new Delicious.com:

Other improvements include:

• Speed improvements make the pages load much faster then the old version.
• The search engine has been “overhauled” to be much faster and smarter. The search feature will now search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network.
• Improved RSS feeds and APIs
• New delicious discussion forum for additional support

The impending reorganization seems, paradoxically, both a driver of the recent executive departures and a response to it. Techmeme has lots of gossip and discussion about the Yahoo employee exits. In particular, TechCrunch reports on the decision to leave by Delicious founder Joshua Schachter:

I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management. So that was mostly the result rather than the cause, if that makes sense. It was an incredibly frustrating experience and I wish I was a lot more like Stewart [Butterfield] in terms of pushing my point of view.

This is the “other side” of being acquired by a larger company. Similar complaints have been made by entrepreneurs about Google, most notably in the cases of Dodgeball and dMarc, whose founders left Google in frustration.

The impending Yahoo reorganization is speculatively laid out in the Wall Street Journal and in more detail in AllThingsD. While few things are clear, it appears that a good deal more responsibility for both monetization and products will flow to Hilary Schneider, who is highly capable but has only been with the company since Fall, 2006.

There’s also been increasing speculation about CEO Jerry Yang’s tenure, given the turmoil. On a press call yesterday I was being prodded to make dire predictions about Yahoo’s future. I’m cautious about being glib about the whole situation. Yahoo has been “down” and come back before. For example, Yahoo was slumping in 2001, during the previous recession, when then CEO Tim Koogle quit the company.

There are still many talented, smart people at Yahoo and if this transition is skillfully managed, the company can come back. However, the stakes are much higher now than in 2001.

The new features include:

• Extremely high performance implementation allows for near instantaneous searching with very large accounts (over 10K bookmarks)
• Full del.icio.us sidebar and toolbar implementation with bookmark sync and typedown search
• Toolbar indicators for new network activity and links for you
• Works on IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta on both XP and Vista

For help using the extension on Firefox, use this Yahoo Group, and for help with the IE version, use this Yahoo Group.