Goddamnit

I don't know how many of you still read this comm, but I'll post anyway! On Tuesday Yahoo laid off the entire Delicious team and today it announced at a company all-hands meeting that it will be "sunsetting" Delicious, aka shutting it down, although there are no details yet on when or how, from any of my sources inside Yahoo. It could be months or years - although they'll almost certainly announce it ahead of time (at some point), like Geocities.

I used Delicious from the first day it was released in 2003 and worked for it as the community manager from 2005 to 2009 - you might remember me from a few posts on this comm and from my thousands of posts on the Delicious support forum as Britta. Delicious means more to me than I know how to explain.

Options for moving your bookmarks: Two of my best friends (and also friends of the Delicious founder) maintain the best Delicious clone, called Pinboard, here: http://pinboard.in/ - I fully recommend it. It's fast and simple and not-gorgeous, but it works. It's worth the $7. Diigo - http://www.diigo.com/ - is also an option, with more features, but I've never had full confidence in its reliability or security (I've observed it being pretty buggy - I'd just be careful).

But both of those services simply tolerate fan stuff, like Delicious does/did, and I'm thinking about a plan to make a clone specialized for fandom bookmarks, something like how Dreamwidth is a fan-friendly clone of LJ. I also have a full-time job at a real (and very very exciting in itself) startup, so I can't devote all that much energy to this, but I have weekends! Well, usually.

In other words: I get all maudlin about what Delicious could have been, and it's time to channel that into something productive. And I need a good name for it! Ideas? And you guys would be my first and best users, and I'd need your help for this crazy project - right now, figuring out what the minimal set of features would be. What are the very basics you would need before moving your bookmarks to this thing? Import from Delicious, tags, bundles, notes, titles, what else?

Update:

Edited a bit for clarity and updating. My initial idea for a name was "ficrinth", but you all are right, something like "fanmarks" would be better. Also, since Dreamwidth has memories and AO3 has bookmarking features, this thing would need to interoperate with those sites in a sensible way! Or maybe the most minimal version of this idea, actually, would be to brainstorm about what AO3 and Dreamwidth need in order to work well, and then collaboratively work on making that happen. It might actually be detrimental to have *three* places for the same kind of links and metadata — maybe this project could instead serve as a kind of bridge between Dreamwidth, AO3, Pinboard, etc. — for better rec sharing and finding than any one of them by themselves. Hmm.

(Pinboard is really best for a general Delicious replacement right now, by the way. They import from Delicious, and they can handle large accounts - their largest account has 60,000 bookmarks right now and that's fine with them, and they are also perfectly fine with the idea of accounts full of kink meme links.)

Update again: If you're interested in this idea and/or have lots to say, join this comm! I'll be posting again in a few days with a more structured discussion of options so we can figure out how to organize our energy and efforts. (It's also open to posting by other people if you want to start other discussions about this stuff.)

For convenience, here's a link to the page where you can export your Delicious bookmarks: https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export - and make sure you read this part: "Also note that if you have created tag bundles, they will not be preserved in your exported file. This is a limitation of the export file format." (Odd to quote myself; I wrote the sentences on that page.) You'll have to make your own list of your bundles and the tags that belong in each one, or use the API to grab the list - but that requires some tech savvy and the list may not be able to be imported into any other bookmarking service anyway. In the easiest case, if you have an old Delicious account (no Yahoo! login) and you have a Mac, go to to Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal and put this in: curl https://{username}:{password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/tags/bundles/all > bundles.txt — you'll get a bundles.txt file in your user directory (the folder that contains your Desktop, Documents, etc. folders) that lists your bundles in XML format.

And another update: An announcement on the Delicious blog: "we are not shutting down Delicious...we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive." - I have to do my work today instead of focusing on this stuff right now, but a very interesting development.

Another: Metafandom has a great roundup of current discussions. And there's some confusion everywhere about whether anybody is left on the Delicious team; my understanding now is that there are two engineers making sure the service doesn't fall over accidentally.