on the massive delicious fail that happened last week
So I'm a little late to the delicious bitching party, but that's only because I've spent every spare moment of the last week and a half unable to move beyond making faces of incoherent rage at my delicious account.
For my RL friends who don't know, delicious (way back when, there used to be some periods in there, but I've forgotten where they go: del.ici.ous? de.li.ci.ous? eh.) is was a social bookmarking site, where people could save their links, organize them with tags (which could be further organized with tag bundles), and share them with others through rss feeds, tag subscriptions, and networks. Or if you're antisocial like me, you can just start by checking out who else has saved a link you've saved and wikiwalk from there.
It was used heavily by fandom to (pretty freaking extensively) archive fanworks--fanfiction, fanvideos, fanart, etc. It was great for filtering out the quality from the crap (0 bookmarks = crap; 489 bookmarks = quality) when the fandom's overflowing (like Star Trek) and also for learning about newly posted fics in a smaller fandom (like Leverage). And, dude, the tags were a thing of beauty. Feel like angst? People tag that. Feel like fluffy romance? People tag that. Feel like a fic where one of the characters, through an unfortunate series of events, is turned into a kitten? People tag that. (I'm not actually exaggerating on that one.) Me, I set up my account in 2009 to keep track of the explosion of fic that followed the release of the Star Trek reboot movie, and it's been my go-to source for a fanfic fix ever since. Until the massive haberdashery that happened last Monday, that is.
Delicious was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and then bought by Yahoo in 2005, where it languished with minimal development for a number of years. Yahoo decided to cut it loose last December, provoking something of a mass exodus of users to alternate bookmarking sites like pinboard or diigo. But then, at the last moment, the founders of youtube swooped in and bought delicious, to the sounds of joyous relief. Maybe a bit of exaggeration there, but seriously, I was relieved. For a while, anyway. Then, last Monday, AVOS launched the new delicious site.
Fandom response can be best summarized by the following (hysterical and spot-on) dramatization: When Bookmarks were in Mustache Land by jedusaur (point of interest: this was posted 10/3 and now has 73 bookmarks on pinboard, and 23 on delicious)
If, after reading that, you're at all skeptical about pinboard founder Maciej's extreme awesome-ness, this is his blog post welcoming fandom to pinboard: The Fans Are All Right (posted 10/2 with currently 121 bookmarks in pinboard and 86 in delicious) wherein he not only references and provides a link to The Monsterdoc, but also to this amazing fanfic: The Morning After by ambyr (posted 9/29 with currently 81 bookmarks in pinboard and 148 in delicious).
Seriously, though, on a less fandom-related note, the delicious relaunch was an unmitigated disaster:
AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure
By Violet Blue | September 28, 2011, 3:50pm PDT
Summary: Link sharing site Delicious re-launched on Monday with unwanted changes, huge technical problems, and a lesson in how to kill a beloved product.
My favorite part is that one of the AVOS people clearly read the article because he left a comment and the only thing he could contest was that AVOS wasn't requiring users to provide their full names.
So. Yeah. I've got a pinboard account now.