Et tu, Delicious?

With more than a little regret and annoyance, I moved my Bloglines feeds to Google Reader when it was announced they would be eliminating the service. (Yes, Bloglines was subsequently purchased by MerchantCircle and users are to migrate to the new system.) Now Yahoo will be closing Delicious. After reading the notice, I logged in to Delicious and exported my 738+ bookmarks. The tags do not display in the html list, though they do in the source code, which makes recreating the portal a daunting task.

• Yahoo Shutting Down Delicious, Buzz, Other Services
  "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," a Yahoo spokeswoman said via e-mail. "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." -- Chloe Albanesius, PC Mag.com, 12-16/10


• Yahoo Closing Delicious
  "It’s a sad day for the many people who have come to rely on del.icio.us, a very popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo, which bought the site in 2005, is now in the midst of shutting it down after deeming it an ”off-strategy product.” This news comes to us via TechCrunch who verified the story with a WSJ reporter as well as with Yahoo itself, mere days after announcing it had layed off 4% of its staff in a recent downsizing exercise." -- Simon Cohen, Sync, 12/16/10


• Is Yahoo Sutting Down Delicious? Yes
  "For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that the Yahoo layoffs included the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out the above Yahoo! product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others." -- Alexia Tsotsis, TechCrunch, 12/16/10


• Yahoo Plans to Kill Off Delicious Bookmarking Service
  "According to a leaked photo, Yahoo plans to close a number of services, including Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog and Delicious, the popular bookmarking site. Most of the closing services are Yahoo projects that simply never went anywhere, but Delicious, which Yahoo acquired in 2005, was once the king of bookmarks and helped popularize many of the key elements of today’s social web." -- Scott Gilbertson, WebMonkey, 12/17/10

It is simple enough to export my bookmarks to another service, there's a quick tutorial on how to export into Diigo and a convenient video highlighting their service (be patient,"As there are huge number of requests lately, it may take a while."). And these things happen when using a free, dare I say it, cloud based Internet resource. It just so happened these were two of my favorite early 2.0 tools.

The real issue here is people, reports are Yahoo laid off over 600 workers recently - among them the entire Delicious staff.

[Update] Delicious Blog 12/17/2010

What's Next for Delicious?
"Many of you have read the news stories aboutDelicious that began appearing yesterday. We’re genuinely sorry to have these stories appear with so little context for our loyal users. While we can’t answer each of your questions individually, we wanted to address what we can at this stage and we promise to keep you posted as future plans get finalized."