So Yahoo are shutting down Delicious. Shame. It's such a fantastically utilitarian service. Over the past four years I've bookmarked, tagged and categorised almost 7,000 pieces of content which have, over time accumulated into an enormously useful information repository that I typically access several times a day. Judging by the outcry on Twitter, I'm not the only one.
The loss of one of my favourite (and one of the early) Web 2.0 services is a pain (I shall be looking to migrate my bookmarks, probably onto Pinboard which is a paid for service). But what really bothers me is that after buying the service back in 2005, Yahoo did so little with it. It makes no sense. Delicious is valuable and apposite enough for me to be happy to pay for it, particularly if there was a premium service that made it integrate better with other services (like Instapaper for example, which I also use a lot) or made more use of the network functionality which, with a little work, could have offered me a hugely valuable content stream in a similar (and potentially better) way that Twitter now does for many. I don't think I'm alone in thinking this. The lesson is surely that if you want people to pay for something, you have to ask them. The worse thing? They haven't even tried.
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