1. As a video tagging community, that is the very question on our minds these days.

broadbandsports.com
upload/tag/share

Posted at 8:36PM on Feb 17th 2006 by Greg Prosl

2. Thinking a start-up could drop into a large company and continue on their iterative path of development is missing some essential understanding of what happens when somebody gets acquired and why somebody would want to get bought.

Let's start with why somebody would want to get bought. Del.icio.us, Flickr, and now Measure Map all needed server resources and solid hardware and bandwidth. This is expensive to acquire and even more so to maintain. The outages and lack of responsiveness of the services prior to being bought shows through. All of these services are quite resource intensive. Converting to another company's hardware platform that is built for stability, scalability, uptime, and heavy usage takes time, a lot of time. But the payoff down the road is huge.

Comparing Yahoo Photos, which has been integrated into Yahoo! and its millions of users and comparing it to Flickr, which had a relatively small user group at the time of purchase less a year ago it a rough comparison. The social web tools are fringe services, Flickr had about 300,000 users at time of purchase and compared to the 14 million Yahoo users, let alone millions of other users on the web. Del.icio.us had a little over 350,000 users at time of purchase. These are edge case user tools. It is still rather low on the adoption curve.

These services were bought to change the culture and add new functionality into the companies purchasing them. Integration is not easy on either party's part. Keeping a service up and running, while integrating it into existing enterprise environments is not a quick, nor easy task. To be honest, I have been quite impressed how well Yahoo! did with Flickr and how little disruption it caused, but it was done over a series of months not weeks.

Adding Yahoo search to del.icio.us is going to be a tough task and a possibly a significant rewrite of a piece of del.icio.us.

Your question about interoperability is a great question. Open APIs enable this. I can easily pull down my whole del.icio.us corpus, pulling it into another service takes writing scripts and processes. One of the things I personally look at, is not how easily I can get del.icio.us sucked in (this is highly important), but how easily can I get the information out.

Questions have been floating for the past few months around a central tool to bookmarking service that sends a file or package to each of the services. A one stop bookmarking and tagging tool.

I have found Ma.gnolia lacking as it only sees del.icio.us as its competitor and not the other 30 or so social bookmarking tools that have the same aim and more advanced functionality and features.

Posted at 11:30AM on Feb 20th 2006 by vanderwal

3. So let me get this straight... The "import" feature is currently offline, but the "export" feature is still working fine. And you feel like this is locking you into del.icio.us?

"Held hostage" to a "loyalty oath"? Have you not used any other free web service before - such as one of the many to whom import/export features were as alien as letting eyeballs go away free and unmonetized?

And you do know that del.icio.us is only a few guys, right? And getting acquired doesn't magically solve everything instantly, right?

If you're really worried, grab a copy of Scuttle [1] for yourself (which is mighty fine, I might add) and hunker down in your own private bookmark shelter for awhile until import emerges from the strikeout font treatment...

[1]: http://scuttle.org/

Posted at 3:24PM on Feb 21st 2006 by l.m.orchard

4. While the import function is shut down, there's nothing stopping anyone from writing a simple script against the API to get the same result. Given the number of third party tools available I'm surprised no one wrote this yet, but it wouldn't be hard. Maybe you guys can use some of the AOL cash to develop it as a contribution back to the community.

Posted at 6:16PM on Feb 21st 2006 by BillSaysThis

5. It would be nice if there was a script to perform the import function. I've looked around and haven't found much. Conversation around this has spurred me to try and learn some things so I don't have to preface discussions with "I am not a designer" if possible.

I'm surprised that commenters here seem as defensive as you all do, but perhaps I'm wrong and complaining too much myself.

Posted at 7:34PM on Feb 21st 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick

6. Over a year ago I wrote a simple perl script to import browser bookmarks to del.icio.us. It's always been a throw-away project because that function belongs in Delicious itself. Joshua's assurances that their import function would be available soon has served as quite a deterrent to further time investment.

Considering how much effort Team Del.icio.us spends just keeping the system from being crushed by the load, and all the time spent defending the system from people who trying to game it, I wonder if they've deferred import out of concern for these issues.

I understand your frustration, Marshall, but with a dozen bookmarking services out there to choose from, I don't see how this adds up to a 'loyalty oath.' The credo at Del.icio.us has always been 'you own your own data', and while the feature set may be lagging your expectations, nobody is holding you hostage.

If you want some help moving bookmarks back and forth between services, drop me a note.

Posted at 10:26PM on Feb 21st 2006 by Brian Del Vecchio

7. "Apparently being bought by one of the forefathers of search has done no good for solving the problem of finding items with two tags applied to them instead of just one."

RawSugar, http://www.rawsugar.com, (disclosure: where I work) does have this particular problem solved and in fact navigating by multiple tags and putting hierarchy into your own set of tags is a big part of the difference between our service and other offerings.

Further, we do have both import (for del.icio.us, Furl, WordPress, MovableType and browser favorites) and export through RSS or a simple API. In fact multiple imports of the same material will cause no change in your directory contents, other than if you change any of the tags or notes.

Posted at 12:28PM on Feb 22nd 2006 by Bill Lazar

8. It's baffling that small companies get pumped full of cash and then stagnate. I and many users will never use delicious until bookmark.html import is available.

Fox paid $580 million for Myspace, but they haven't invested even 5 bucks in improving the reliability, performance, or UI: "Myspace chat is down, we're working on it!"

No thanks jerks.

Posted at 3:54PM on Feb 22nd 2006 by NathanB

9. How about support for importing and exporting using the xFolk microformat for publishing tagged-links?

http://microformats.org/wiki/xfolk

Thanks,

Tantek

Posted at 3:24PM on Feb 23rd 2006 by Tantek