The Delicious social bookmarking site used to be one of my favourite social media tools. Not any more. When Yahoo bought Delicious back in 2005 for an estimated $18 million, we all expected great things, and we got them. It was a great place to post a link, share it and watch it blossom. The tagging facility was second to none, and it was easy to see who else was interested in the same links as you, and then discover what other links they had bookmarked that might have passed you by. It was both creative, and a voyage of discovery. A lot of that functionality has changed since Delicious has been sold on to AVOS (known as founders of YouTube) for a reported $5 million. This represents a significant loss of capital for Yahoo.
Since the launch of new Delicious this week, the Twitterverse and blogosphere have been buzzing with scathing commentary and complaints, stories of lost bookmarks, mislaid tagging bundles, personal networks that have simply disappeared. This post from Pulp Tech is particularly critical of the new Delicious. The old maxim, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, seems to have passed AVOS completely by. People don't like change, so when AVOS relaunched Delicious on September 27 this year in a 'back to beta' state, it went down like a lead balloon. Too much change too quickly is a big mistake. Many are migrating their content to other bookmarking sites such as Diigo, because they can't see any point in using Delicious anymore, given that much of the useful stuff they spent years becoming familiar with, is gone. That also has a compounding influence on the personal networks users have built up of course. Many of us wish that AVOS would put Delicious back to its previous state, where everything was familiar and where we knew exactly where our tags and networks were. AVOS has done more harm than good changing things so radically and so quickly.
It is annoying when you rely on a service as a knowledge tool, and then suddenly, your content isn't there anymore, or it's there but you can't find it easily. To be fair to AVOS, they gave advanced warning that changes would be made. What they didn't do very well was inform users fully to what extent those changes would affect everyone. Now they have a bit of a crisis on their hands. Amidst the storm of criticism they are weathering, Delicious is struggling to put things right and while it's doing so, appears to be leaking many of its previously loyal followers. I don't blame people for leaving. Delicious just isn't that tasty anymore.
Have your say: What do you think about the new Delicious?
Not so tasty now by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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