Delicious (website)

Delicious

The Delicious homepage
URL	delicious.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Online social bookmarking
Registration	Optional
Owner	Avos Systems
Created by	Joshua Schachter
Launched	September 2003
Alexa rank	327 (November 2011[update])[1]
Current status	Active

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.^[2][3] It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

The site was re-sold to AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011^[4] and relaunched in a "back to beta" state on 27 September that year.^[5]

Site description

Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL delicious.com/tag/wiki^[6] displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by other users.

Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of Internet memes and trends.

Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Many features have contributed to this, including the website's simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication.

Use of Delicious is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user can download his or her own data through the site's API in an XML or JSON format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.

All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; the site is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections.^[7] Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature can be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.

There are several competing social bookmarking websites as well as a few open source clones.

History

The old logo of Delicious.

The precursor to Delicious was Muxway, a link blog that had grown out of a text file that Schachter maintained to keep track of links related to Memepool.^[8] In September 2003, Schachter released the first version of Delicious.^[9] In March 2005, he left his day job to work on Delicious full-time, and in April 2005 it received approximately $2 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures and Amazon.com.^[10]

Yahoo! acquired Delicious on December 9, 2005.^[11] Various guesses suggest it was sold for somewhere between US$15 million and US$30 million.^[12][13]

On December 16, 2010, an internal slide from a Yahoo! meeting leaked, indicating that Delicious would be "sunsetted" in the future, which seemed to mean "shut down".^[14] Later Yahoo clarified that they would be selling Delicious, not ending it.^[15]

On April 27, 2011, Delicious announced the site was sold to Avos Systems, a company created by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.^[16] Unbeknownst to members, Yahoo! operated the site until September 2011.

On September 27, 2011, Delicious launched its completely new version 3.0 design in beta. This came in as a surprise to many of its users, with many features being disabled, removed or temporarily unavailable.^[17]Avos removed the Delicious Support Forum and had advised users that communication with Avos should take place via email. Reaction from users was overwhelmingly negative.^[18][19]

Name

The "del.icio.us" domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect to the new domain, delicious.com.

In an interview, Schachter explained how he chose the name: "I'd registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words. In early discussions, a friend referred to finding good links as 'eating cherries' and the metaphor stuck, I guess."^[20]

On September 6, 2007, Schachter announced the website's name would change to "Delicious" when the site would be redesigned.^[21] The new design went live on July 31, 2008.

On June 16, 2011, AVOS Systems acquired d.me domain name.^[22]

See also

Internet portal

• Web 2.0

References

1. ^ "Delicious.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/delicious.com. Retrieved 2011-11-02. 
2. ^ "Exclusive: Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 Preview". TechCrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/exclusive-screen-shots-and-feature-overview-of-delicious-20-preview/. 
3. ^ "Delicious is 5!". blog.delicous.com. http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/11/delicious-is-5.html. 
4. ^ "YouTube Founders Aquire Delicous". blog.delicous.com. http://blog.delicious.com/. 
5. ^ Karunamurthy, Vijay. "The First 20 Hours". AVOS. http://www.avos.com/the-first-20-hours/. Retrieved 28 September 2011. 
6. ^ Delicious.com, wiki
7. ^ "Private Saving". blog.delicious.com. http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2006/03/private_saving_.html. 
8. ^ Joshua Schachter, 2006 Young Innovator in Technology Review
9. ^ Joshua Schachter. "delicious as of september 13, 2003. close to inception". Screenshot. Flickr.com. http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/765796263/in/set-72157600740166824/. 
10. ^ Arrington, Michael (June 16, 2005). "Profile: Delicious". Techcrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/06/16/profile-delicious/. 
11. ^ Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us : FlickrYahoolicious!. Search Engine Journal. 2005-12-09. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2642. 
12. ^ Tag Sale - January 01, 2006, CNNMoney.com
13. ^ Schonfeld, Erick (December 9, 2005). "But is it del.ove.ly?". CNN. http://money.cnn.com/2005/12/10/technology/delicious_biz20_120905/index.htm. Retrieved May 1, 2010. 
14. ^ "Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us?". TechCrunch. 2010-12-16. http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/. 
15. ^ "What’s Next for Delicious?". delicious blog. 17 December 2010. http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-delicious.html. 
16. ^ Guynn, Jessica (27 April 2011). "Bookmark this: YouTube's Chad Hurley and Steve Chen buy Delicious from Yahoo". Los Angeles Times. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/bookmark-this-youtubes-chad-hurley-and-steve-chen-buy-delicious-from-yahoo.html. Retrieved 27 April 2011. 
17. ^ "Delicious 3.0 – The End of Del.icio.us". http://www.whatissixsigma.net/delicious-3-0-the-end-of-del-icio-us/. Retrieved 27 September 2011. 
18. ^ "Oh, Delicious — where did it all go so wrong?". GigaOM. 2011-09-28. http://gigaom.com/2011/09/28/oh-delicious-where-did-it-all-go-so-wrong/. Retrieved 28 September 2011. 
19. ^ "AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure". ZDNet. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/avos-delicious-disaster-lessons-from-a-complete-failure/705. Retrieved 2011-09-29. 
20. ^ Rands in Repose (December 3, 2004). "A Del.icio.us Interview". http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2004/12/03/a_delicious_interview.html. 
21. ^ "Exclusive: Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 Preview". TechCrunch. 2007-09-07. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/exclusive-screen-shots-and-feature-overview-of-delicious-20-preview/. 
22. ^ .ME of Course! (June 17, 2011). "D.ME for Del.icio.us". http://dot-me.of-cour.se/2011/06/17/d-for-del-icio-us/. 

External links

• Official website
• Blog.delicious.com
• YouTube Founders Revamping a Site for Link Sharing, Jenna Wortham, The New York Times, September 11, 2011