Back in April,Violet Blue mused about the new ToS for the AVOS owned Delicious. She revisited that appreciation a few days after the unveiling of the new and hobbled Delicious,and she was not happy:
Delicious is a bitter lesson for everyone. It’s the difference between how people actually use a product versus how rich,out-of-touch knuckleheads think people should be using that product,all to further their own self-interests.
At the initial moment the doubt was about the restriction of content,and how would the new company preserve the most important aspect of the newly acquired Delicious:curating content. The new sad service shows that the owners did not appreciate what they had,and were instead creating a marketing tool:real names,emails,damaged apps,lost links etc.
Now,a few months over,it is more evident:by deleting the ad hoc communities that were created by the suscriptions and network concepts,AVOS took away the expectation of high quality content and replaced it with a marketing hack,“Following”;I follow people on Twitter,but the StN ration is very low:I have Twitter for the same reason that I read the newspaper when at the store:a sense of zeitgeist and low activity elsewhere.
Delicisous,though,was the spot where the bookmarks indicated self-aggregating communities of practice,where I could know who was into AI and what interesting links they would save. I would see those pages with a purpose and come away with valid,useful,interesting links.
The networks gone,the suscriptions deleted,all I get from Delicious now is the same link aggregation that Stumbleupon,Reddit,Google and Bing offer,but without the contextual depth that any of those have.
When I looked at the tag “games”,the network gave me results that were indicative of my interests. Now,I would have to wade through pages of inane content,irrelevant links,the ubiquitous spam and the absurdly tagged links. Useless.
Stacks could be fine,but I would have to do it all again:find the stacks that are relevant to me,the users that share interests,avoid repeated results,etc. I do have my own sources now,and I have my old links,which I will review for entertainment purposes.
Bye,delicious. You are a great example of a web2.0 company,from brilliant startup to corporate zombie.
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