Comments on: The End of Delicious?

By: Marieke Guy

Marieke Guy — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:56:35 +0000

A quick update – the YouTube founders have now acquire Delicious.

I was sent the following message regarding my account:

Dear Delicious User,
Yahoo! is excited 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, Hurley and Chen have firsthand expertise enabling millions of consumers to share their experiences with the world. Delicious will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS.

To continue using Delicious, you must agree to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks to AVOS. After a transition period and after your bookmarks are transferred, you will be subject to the AVOS terms of service and privacy policy.

Reasons to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks
• Continue uninterrupted use of Delicious.
• Keep your Delicious account and all your bookmarks.
• Enjoy the same look and feel of Delicious today plus future product innovations.

What happens if you do not transfer your bookmarks
• Delicious in its current form will be available until approximately July 2011.
• After that, you will no longer be able to use your existing Delicious account and will not have
access to your existing bookmarks or account information.

About AVOS
AVOS is a new Internet company founded by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen who, in 2005, founded YouTube, the world’s largest online video platform. Before YouTube, Hurley and Chen were early employees at PayPal, a leading online payment service that is now part of eBay. Delicious will become a part of AVOS, based in San Mateo, California.

By: Owen Stephens

Owen Stephens — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:03:23 +0000

I have to admit that I find it hard to get very worked up about the (possible) demise of delicious. I do use the service, and will be slightly sorry if it goes – but it feels like someone telling me I’m getting a new filing cabinet at work – a bit of a hassle, but in the end I’ll have somewhere new to put my stuff.

What is more interesting is the (potential) loss of the aggregation represented by Delicious – that is, no one individual’s set of bookmarks is that interesting, but the aggregation of large numbers is more worth preserving.

By: Ed Pinsent

Ed Pinsent — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:30:53 +0000

Marieke

Preserving Delicious may not be quite the same as digital preservation (of which the target is usually a digital object, rather than a retrieval system), but you have raised a potentially important issue – i.e. the preservation of a system or service which enhances our understanding of a digital collection, through providing a structured form of intellectual control.

From what you’re saying, maybe Delicious could be seen as a sophisticated form of a filing system / retrieval system, or a finding aid, for websites. You’re starting to make a good case for why it’s important when you state that “The JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation also has 300+ urls associated with it”, and it might be worth expanding on what’s at stake and what are the consequences of losing the references to those 300+ URLS. Any archivist or records manager will tell you why keeping some record of an original filing system is important; this is the old-fashioned concept of “original order”. (see for example http://www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details.asp?DefinitionKey=69 )

To my mind it’s not simply a question of exporting website bookmarks for import into another system or service similar to Delicious. Perhaps we need a more stable and durable form of a finding aid for websites, one that can be maintained by an information manager in line with existing descriptive standards. In other words, a metadata schema.