Bookmarking site Delicious bought from Yahoo
One thing we didn’t get from the start was why people would want to bookmark websites away from their own web browsers. We just used one browser on one computer and that was it. Press Ctrl-D and the site was added to an ever growing list of sites you liked. But as other browsers came along and we were using more machines (one in the office, one at home, etc) the need to access those bookmarks grew. So Delicious, del.icio.us as it was, helped in organising us. We could access the same bookmarks from several different places. And, with helpful toolbar add-ons we could easily add a bookmark without leaving the page we liked.
As they say, there’s not much money in bookmarking websites. There’s quite a few mind – Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon & tumblr to name but a few. Some are more like microblogs or link sharing sites but they’re great for building links into your website, and therefore SEO optimisation. Using AddThis to a website even takes the pain out of sharing a site with friend. But Delicious selling out to Yahoo looked like Delicious was doomed. Having add-ons that were then incompatible with newer versions of web browsers didn’t help. Though in fairness we have a number of issues with Firefox 4 and add-ons, despite Firefox heralding their new version as being made for add-on developers.
Today it’s announced that the founders of YouTube have bought Delicious for the bargain price of S1m (Yahoo bought it for $30m) – but having moved our account over to the new Delicious, we’re hopeful that the service will remain, might even grow, and our bookmark list will grow.
