Commentary

A Bad Taste *done

  • by , October 3, 2011

I'm nothing special.

I don't have a photographic memory—I can't memorize a website's URL if I find something cool or interesting online. An easy solution is to bookmark that page.

Simple enough.

As a college student, I'm always on the move and I don't always have my laptop with me. If bookmarked an item on my web browser, I wouldn't be able to access it from the computer lab. As a work-around, I would copy URLs, paste them into an email, and send it to myself.

It was ugly and unorganized, but it worked.

Last fall, my Introduction to Digital Literacies professor introduced me to Delicious: a website that would solve a problem I didn't know I had.

According to Wikipedia, Delicious "is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks." Basically, instead of saving my bookmarks to my browser, I could save them to this website where I could access them from anywhere.

I happily used this service for the rest of the semester. Unfortunately, I missed the news where Yahoo laid off a lot of employees last December, including the entire Delicious team. While this was a time for Delicious users to find an alternative service, I stayed with a bliss of ignorance.

That is, until last weekend.

When I went to Delicious, I was greeted by a new layout. Any confusion I had multiplied when I tried to log in—there wasn't an option to connect via my Yahoo account!

I immediately consulted with the Googles and learned that last week, Yahoo had sold Delicious to a company called AVOS. Users who connected via Yahoo had a small window to transfer their account information to the new AVON service.

As for users like myself who missed that window, AVOS tells us that our "data remains with Yahoo! since they never got your permission to move your account."

It's been a few days and I'm still frustrated.

I'm not upset with AVON—I'm sure they will update the site and make it nicer for its users.

On the other hand, I'm highly disappointed with Yahoo. Not once did I get an email regarding the situation with Delicious. Yahoo was so eager to sell Delicious that any complications its users experienced would just be collateral damage—I got a strong sense of "it's not our problem anymore."

While I patiently wait for the situation to straighten out (if it does), I'm going to revert back to my old ways of saving bookmarks. I'm also considering some alternative options such as Pinboard and Diigo.

Ultimately, my decision will be based on what Avon can do with their Yahoo users. One thing I know for sure is that Delicious left a bad taste in my mouth.

1 comment about "A Bad Taste *done".
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  1. joseph, October 6, 2011 at 11:26 p.m.

    What is so crazy is I was just thinking about this at the beginning of the week. I have way too many sites I visit and articles I am trying to keep track of and I started looking for shareware that I could use like a database for it. I checked out diigo.com though and it was perfect. It does exactly what I need. Delicious was never as nice as what diigo is now. I have been using it since your post went live at the beginning of the week. I have kept all of my bookmarks since 1997... yeh I know some of you were in diapers then, but I am now sorting which ones still work and creating lists and groups for them on diigo. Thank you for finding a gem of a service out there.

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