Delicious & AVOS: Points of discussion

[murklins]

I don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to highlight a few things I've seen people saying in the comments of my last post and around fandom in general. (Note: I did not exactly cast the net very wide, this is not a comprehensive list or anything, it's just stuff I saw on my flist & rlist.)

1. 
   One thing a lot of people are thankful for is that with

Comments

[turlough]

To me the AVOS TOS looks like it was designed for a completely different sort of website. It doesn't seem applicable to a bookmarking site at all. I mean, links in themselves can hardly be considered vulgar or offensive.

[murklins]

Yeah, that seems quite possible, that it could be some boilerplate TOS, or something they cribbed from their YouTube days, or, most interestingly (worryingly?), something designed for where they see the site heading. Yahoo claims to have had "numerous parties interested in acquiring the site" and they say they chose AVOS because of their "unique vision for Delicious". So maybe their vision requires a TOS like that? Maybe we'll bee more content actually getting stored on Delicious itself?

[murklins]

*bee = see

[turlough]

Yeah, I'm more worried about what future plans the new owners have for the site than I am about them starting to censor our bookmarks.

[murklins]

Yesterday I went through the comments to dreamyshade's Goddamnit post from December, and looking at the Google Doc of desired features that just_chiara put together really reinforces my belief that fandom Delicious users are outliers. We force Delicious to work for us, but even in its current form it isn't really designed for the way we'd like to use it. So I'm generally worried that the direction Delicious takes is far more likely to be away from the needs of us, the fringe users.

(I still really want a fan-run social bookmarking site. I personally can't work on it right now, but I still think about it all the time and cherish the dream that we can organize something eventually.)

[murklins]

Did you read this: Can Delicious Solve Our Information Discovery Problem? It makes me wonder what the heck Delicious is even going to look like a year from now. And in this article Delicious founder Joshua Schachter says things like "I think the time [for Delicious] has passed, but maybe they'll do something cool with the name."

*weeps*

[turlough]

No, I hadn't seen either of those. It still sounds pretty nebulous to me but I guess time will tell.

[murklins]

Yes, pretty much all unfounded speculation. I hate that we have so little concrete information about the future. Why don't I have a time travel machine?