Today came news that Yahoo is likely shuttering Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service acquired from Joshua Schacter in 2005.
Yahoo never did much to nurture and grow Delicious and it remained a niche product with many diehard fans among the tech community.
Delicious was one of the first great cloud apps – users were able to stop managing bookmarks in browsers and could access them from any browser on any PC. For the power user, Delicious was a wonderful data set to mine.
If you’re a delicious fan, you probably are panicking right now, but there are a few simple steps you can take.
First, back up your Delicious bookmarks. You can do that from the Delicious page by clicking settings – export, but I prefer using Automate Excel – a simple tool that pulls all your Delicious bookmarks into a spreadsheet.
OK, so now you’ve got your bookmarks, but they’re not very usable. What tools can you use instead?
The leading contender right now is an app called PinboardIN. Unlike Delicious, PinboardIN is not free. It costs $7.14 to join, or you can pay $25 for an annual license with advanced archiving and search capabilities. For now, I ponied up the $7 to see how good it is before deciding whether to upgrade. And if you’re scoffing at paying $7, remember that the lack of a business model is what required Delicious to sell to Yahoo, who neglected it.
PinboardIN is pretty compelling. In addition to the Delicious-like features (and yes, you can automatically import your existing delicious bookmarks), PinboardIN can automatically add any links from your Twitter stream , from Instapaper and more.
I’ve just signed up for PinboardIN but it looks good as a starting point.
Another option is to move to Evernote. Evernote does more than Delicious (can post text, images, links, etc) but has no social aspects. I’ve used Evernote on the iPhone, but for me, PinboardIN is closer to the Delicious experience. For those who want to try it, Evernote provides a simple primer on making the transition from Delicious.
