Delicious is a bitter lesson for everyone. It’s the difference between how people actually use a product versus [...]]]> 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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