Yahoo Just Pissed Off The One Group They Shouldn’t With Delicious Closure
centernetworks.com
centernetworks.com
An analogy.
I travel a lot, sometimes "living on the road" for quite a while at a time. It's a marvelous life.
I carefully consider what I pack. Every little thing takes space and weight, which means less space/weight for something else.
A friend of mine was with me when I was doing some packing, and I was looking at my Kindle charger and iPhone charger. Both of the USB plugs can plug into an adapter so it can plug into a power outlet.
Turns out, Kindle and iPhone USB-to-outlet adapter are the same, and it works for both devices. I tested it, and then was weighing them and trying to size up their durability to choose which one to keep.
My friend said, "Why not keep both? They're small, and maybe there'll be problems later if you don't have both..."
And you know what? He's right. I could totally make the judgmental call to keep both of them, and it'd make no real difference on my space/weight. The problem is, there's 10-15 other little things I have to make the same judgment call on, and it adds up fast.
Sometimes you have to cut, even if this particular cut doesn't mean anything significant, because making 10-15 cuts really does add up to something significant.
This doesn't make Yahoo's decision here a good call or a bad call. But it's something to think about when anyone says "This one isn't too [expensive/heavy/big/cumbersome/time-intensive]" - no, maybe not, but little costs can add up fast.
However once we accept that delicious is going to close, the question remains, what happens to the data?
The publically available (non-private) bookmarks, tags and notes should continue to live. Perhaps a dataset could be made available in some way, eg via torrent?
This is would be a brilliant wikileak!
Delicious is not equivalent to Yahoo! Notepad or the other crud they decided to keep.
I travelled to Honduras (from the U.K.) and realised after a few days I didn't have a charger for camera and then battery ran down. It's non standard and I couldn't find one anywhere. However, I noticed someone I met had a similar camera so I just borrowed her charger. In another situation (another trip) a friend's camera failed, but I had two cameras by then, I let her borrow one of mine with her memory card for the rest of the trip - problem solved.
Somehow, I don't think your story (or mine) has anything to do with dropping a business with millions of users, annoying lots of customers, with knock on effects for Flickr, upcomming etc. and losing trust with the early adopter community which are key to many new products succeeding.
Trust is not commodity you can borrow or buy.
This doesn't obviate OP's point - that closing a bunch of services makes developers less inclined to build on your platform. But I'm not sold on the idea that this will irrevocably alienate developers.
Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still jump on cue if the platform is good enough.
It's not about being good. If it is, developers would be all over the WebOS platform. It's because the App Store still generates the most revenue for most developers.
YUI2 or 3? I hated 2 but I think 3 is the best general purpose JS library out there. It works particularly well in coffeescript.
As despairing as I am of Delicious's demise, I can't go along with this. Yahoo hasn't been a developer focused company in the last couple of years, even technologies like Pipes have progressed little.
Yahoo is a media company. They sell advertising. They cater to the masses. They're an AOL. If I were in charge, ditching everything not related to being a mass media company would probably get the chop too. Yahoo is no oasis for developers in my eyes.
So pissing off delicious users won't have any serious financial repercussions. And since it seems plainly evident that Yahoo are now hunkering down in pure survival mode with soccer-mom content plays, it's unlikely Yahoo will need the support of early adopters for the rest of it's shortened lifespan.
Delicious users are mostly using the eco-system of tools rather than the website itself, so there's not much to be gained by splattering it with ads. The only time I see the delicious site these days is when there's a link in my inbox from a contact - and that's edge case for the vast majority of delicious users.
The OP was talking about why Google is more developer friendly but seems to have totally forgotten Wave, Jaiku, etc. This article is just poor generalizations.
Yahoo think they should concentrate on the non developer types that click on adverts.
If I were in the Bay Area or NYC, I would try to find an investor and wrangle a deal to buy the service from Yahoo and run it in such a way. I seriously hope that someone else is doing so.
Btw, a post regarding its competitor http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2014670