As has been mentioned in countless places over the last few days, Yahoo plans to shut down Delicious, the social bookmark service that lots of people use for lots of things. My interest in it is pretty narrow, but important for this blog: I use Delicious to generate the quasi-automatic daily Links Dump postings here. As I surf around during the odd free moment, I tag pages that strike me as interesting, and every morning, Delicious generates a blog post that I then copy and publish here.
I really like this feature, because it gives me a way to acknowledge the dozens of interesting things I run across, but don’t feel strongly enough about to generate a whole post. It also lets me post these with very little effort, which helps with my general efficiency.
So, I am going to need a replacement for this, and I don’t know enough about the other bookmark services out there to know which of them, if any, can do something similar. That’s what the Internet is for, though. So: What should I be looking at as a replacement for Delicious? Please keep in mind that I am only interested in it for generating quasi-automatic Links Dump postings. I don’t care about the many other features Delicious offered– sharing, searching, tagging, whatever– just the automatic blog posting.
Somebody out there must have a service that does something similar. If you know of it, please point me to it. If one doesn’t exist, but you know how to make such a thing, please consider this a request to do so.
DON’T PANIC!
The latest news is that Yahoo! are not planning to shut down Delicious, but rather they are planning to sell it (see http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-delicious.html).
If you still want to move your bookmarks then I don’t know which services provide a daily blog post feature, but it would be pretty easy to knock one up for any service that provides an RSS feed using Yahoo! pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/).
Funny how nobody has been reporting the update that comes straight from the horse’s mouthâ¦guess company sales don’t make for sensational headlines. I exported my bookmarks anyway and will continue to do so as a backup, but no need to panic yet!
People intending to sell a site as a going concern don’t generally fire the entire support team as a first step. Yes, look for a replacement.
I don’t, myself, use delicious, so don’t know what the alternatives do. The cool kids appear to be migrating to Pinboard, which requires payment, unlike delicious. Maciej used to live in Vermont. I don’t know if he still does, but if so, you’d be supporting a neighbour.
You might look at this rundown. I find Y!’s backpedaling unreassuring.
Hahaha! I’m currently in the same boat as you are! With that recent news, coupled with the fact that I have over 2,000 items stored in Delicious, I really am worried.
@thistleingrey, thanks for the comment, I think that’ll help =)
@Chad, aside from thistleingrey’s suggestions, or rather, prior to reading them, I had also been thinking of using Firefox 4 (my default browser) as my alternative. Anyway, with v.4 they’re rolling out Firefox Sync, so I think that’ll do for me as an option as well. Chrome has their own syncing service as well; do they have similar tagging functionality a la Firefox?
My $0.02 =)
I have 17,000 Delicious bookmarks, so I’m not happy to hear this news. I know Ezra Klein recommends Evernote, and I’ll probably fool around with Historius and Pinboard to see if either one seems like it works for me.
I wonder whether a fee-based service is more or less likely to go away than a free one. I don’t mind paying for a service that I use often – and if paying means the service is less likely to vanish, then I’d be happy to pay.