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What Happened to Delicious.com?

[ Delicious? ] What happened to Delicious.com? I logged in today after a week or so and everything is gone. Well okay, not everything, but somehow many features have completely disappeared. After scouring as many options and settings as I could find, there seems to be some serious problems at the new Delicious.com.

Here are a few examples of what you can no longer do at Delicious:

  • View all of your tags – only a small subset of your tags is available.
  • View all links for each tag – only 10 links are available for each tag.
  • Use your tag bundles – remember all those awesome tag bundles? Gone.
  • Customize bookmark settings – no longer possible to show list of views.
  • Organize anything – no longer possible to organize tags or anything else.

Just some random thoughts about all of this nonsense. First of all, it’s nonsense. This is a perfect example of why I refrain from using as many 3rd-party services as possible. It’s not the website’s fault for removing major functionality. Somehow, somewhere, someone thinks it’s a good idea to remove bundles, delete tags and disable navigation. I started using Delicious back when it was spelled “del.icio.us” and before Yahoo swallowed it up into the abyss. Things weren’t great with Yahoo, but at least they kept things usable.

So now that Yahoo is finished doing nothing with Delicious, they’ve sold it to the founders of YouTube, who now seem determined to make the site less usable and more like every other overly simplified social-media site. I sincerely hope that the current Delicious interface/design is an alpha or beta version or something, because it’s really bad to straight-up dump all of the functionality that made the site usable and halfway enjoyable in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong – I ruv Delicious and have been using the service for years now. I think I have like 2824 links bookmarked already, and would love to add a bunch more in the years to come. But I absolutely will drop Delicious like a bad habit if at least basic-level functionality is not restored.

If you know anything about the new changes such as how to view all bookmarks for a given tag, please leave a comment!

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43 responses to “What Happened to Delicious.com?”

  1. Russell Heimlich 2011/09/28 11:01 amReply

    You can get to them by installing the delicious firefox extension. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/delicious-extension/

    It might just be I have my bookmarks cached locally.

    • TFHackett 2011/10/13 2:06 pmReply

      Russell, thanks! I recently switched to Chrome as my browser of choice. I was using Delicious for a couple years but had been logging in with my Yahoo! account. Even though I’d followed Avos’ instructions prior to the changeover, after it changed I couldn’t access my bookmarks. At least now I’ve recovered some/most of them.

  2. I switched to Diigo a few months ago. It allows you to import your Delicious bookmarks. One feature I like is that you can set it to save a bookmark to both Diigo and Delicious.

    I am not a fan of the new Delicious changes either.

  3. Also missing: publishing a tag as rss feed :-(

  4. I’ve experienced a problem where my tags prepended by @ have disappeared. I’ve used these tags for a couple of years for GTD-style contexts.
    I think this is just teething trouble though – the links haven’t disappeared entirely. When I visit delicious.com/squarebracket/@lily (for example) I’m told that I have no bookmarks, but if I look at delicious.com/tag/@lily I can see them!

    • Update: Just discovered that if I leave out the @ in the URL the bookmarks load as expected

  5. Jeff Starr 2011/09/28 11:46 am Reply

    Also noticed that indexed help/support URLs such as:

    http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1118

    ..are now all Not Found, which I suppose makes sense if literally everything changed. Chances are that a lot of useful, relevant help threads were removed (with no redirect).

    That example URL is from a delicious support thread on how to “Sync bookmarks back to Firefox (with tags)”.. which is 404 at the delicious.com site, but Google’s cached versions remain available (for now).

  6. B. Moore 2011/09/28 12:54 pmReply

    I highly recommend using https://Pinboard.in

    Yes I know it is not free but you will love it more than Delicious. Its a 1 man dev team just like you Jeff.

  7. Miller Medeiros 2011/09/28 12:36 pmReply

    – They broke the Firefox extension (yesterday I couldn’t log in, today I can’t see my bookmarks anymore).
    – Tags don’t have auto complete anymore (which really sucks since I have more than 400 tags and don’t remember all of them), doesn’t work even on the Firefox plugin…
    – Only show recommended tags from other people, doesn’t highlight the ones I already used.
    – Removed the list of related tags (it was easier to filter the results) now it’s impossible to find things without the firefox extension since I have more than 5800 bookmarks..

    really considering to switch over to pinboard, only reason I haven’t is because I got used to the Firefox extension…

  8. Lots of answers about these issues here:
    http://deliciousengineering.blogspot.com/

    Even if I’m pretty sure delicious will get back all of its previous features, there certainly has been a lack of communication which pissed people off very much in the first days of this new launch.

  9. Alexandre Giesbrecht 2011/09/28 2:44 pmReply

    A few months ago the “all my tags” featured went missing (at least to me), which complicated things a lot. Where did you see that option in the previous version? In the new version I can’t even see my own tags. I have to type them and there’s not even an autocomplete option, which is what I had been using until last week.

  10. Peter Bockenhauer 2011/09/28 4:13 pmReply

    This is why I switched away from Delicious a couple years back and went with plain old Firefox bookmarks. I never wanted to worry about the service going away or being down. I really never utilized the social/sharing aspect, so that wasn’t a problem. I use Xmarks for syncing across browsers/platforms as well as the iPhone app for access on the go. I feel much better having my bookmarks accessible offline, backed up in my “backup vortex”, portable, accessible everywhere and owned by me.

    • Jeff Starr 2011/09/29 8:16 am Reply

      That’s sounds like where I’m headed.. complete ownership and portability of my online assets. I’ll keep Twitter and a few others, but the majority of those social-media sites (now including delicious.com) are crap and not worth any of my time, effort, or attention.

  11. Anna Ladoshkina 2011/09/28 11:45 pmReply

    When I heard that Yahoo were going to sold delicious I was looking for alternative – not probably for replacement but at least for backup. I chose http://trunk.ly/.

    They allow to import all bookmarks from delicious with tags, my own comments etc. and as bonus you have full-text search through everything. It probably is not perfect solution, but at least it allows me to feel quite calm during this difficult time for all delicious loyal users.

    Great that you are writing about that, may be it will help somehow change things

  12. and:

    Google Chrome AddOn works no longer,

    Install Link for new AddOn (http://www.delicious.com/help/installchrome) doesn’t work

    Tags must completely typed by hand

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