Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly.
I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service, and a better-executed alliance with Mozilla and rode them into prominence and relevance.
All the pieces were there, just the management vision appears not to have been.
Ex-yahoo here, thought I would add my 2 cents. Yahoo under Jerry and Filo (love them both, this is not personal) had a twin culture of niceness and bureaucracy which killed us. Here are an example of each:
1. Niceness - a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work (not WFH, just disappear occasionally). I took it to management, and was told we don’t want to hurt his feelings.
2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered.
I led the European billing engineering team[1] at Yahoo 2003-2005. We processed millions of dollars worth of payments for European premium services every year, so we had a very clear idea of our value to the business, and I had to deal with that exact same thing when we needed a server upgrade once in that three year period that cost a fraction of what I got approved in bonuses for my team every year.
Afterwards I tried to estimate the cost to Yahoo of the time of the dozen or so people, including one of the founders, and I don't remember my estimate, but I do remember it was many times the cost of the server.
[1] yes, Yahoo had multiple billing teams - that's a story in itself; my team existed almost entirely to protect the European businesses against the perceived inability of the US billing team to accept and respect the requirements of the European business. Of course we couldn't admit that to the US team, so my job was basically to repeatedly refuse to surrender an inch in terms of customer requirements whenever the US team tried to convince us to move something over to the US platform.
>2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered.
I personally I believe Hadoop took off at Yahoo because it was a way of getting computing resources that did not need to go through the committees. Big Data? Map Reduce? Less important than simply getting a machine to do things on even if it was just the gateway node (the game of trying gateway nodes till one wasn't at 100% cpu was always fun).
Hard to tell without context, but that first example could easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to employees ethically a good thing to do, but it can also lead to increased productivity in the long run.
Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.
I am curious as to the niceness point. Are you sure he randomly decided not to show up? Perhaps he and management had a quiet agreement where when his chronic diarrhea showed up he stayed home. Work is informed but when you ask they make up some excuse, we don’t want to hurt his feelings, but really that is just the way of not telling you as his medical history is personal and not your business.
Are you me? I had the exact two same issues when I was at Yahoo (2005-2007) basically due to Jerry & Filo. Somehow happy to know that I wasn't the only one :)
You can at least draw a line from Delicious to Reddit.
Digg was originally modelled on the "popular" section of Delicious, an example of building a product out of a feature. Then Reddit saw a huge boost from the eventual Digg community exodus, after a time when Digg itself was the cultural nerve centre.
I was wondering if anyone was going to point this out. I can remember digg being bigger than everything besides maybe stumbleupon for a short while when it came to bookmarking sites.I never would have imagined reddit being what it is now.
> Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly.
Delicious turning into Twitter or Reddit would have been a real loss.
"But it doesn't scale!" is practically a mantra for HN, but scalability is fairly low on the list of values for me. I'd rather have interesting websites than big websites, and I'd rather see websites go bankrupt than compromise their values. The reason I care that Delicious might come back is that it was still interesting when it went down last. Digg and Slashdot still exist, but frankly I care so little that I actually had to look up that fact, and after verifying that they existed, I clicked away.
>Delicious turning into Twitter or Reddit would have been a real loss.
I don't mean to suggest it would have been similar to them culturally, or that it would have evolved into a copy of reddit or twitter. It would have still been delicious, in the sense that it would always be a booking service (as long as they never went all in with Delicious Stacks, which I think nobody remembers except me). I also don't doubt that, at some point, it probably would sell it's soul and lose whatever signature personality it had according to the main users. But it would have remained useful, grown, and been one of the main places everybody goes.
Even with the loses you identify, it was an invaluable asset that could have kept Yahoo relevant.
Now with the idear of delicious coming back, your comment makes me consider all the good low-to-mid scale shit we've lost over time. In ~ 2008 it seems like there were just more fun/interesting sites around. Maybe I was just in an exploratory phase - late teens - and was discovering new things often. Or maybe the barrier to entry today, in terms of design/polish/product is weirdly high, and has pushed out the seeker-net in favor of normie-net.
Part of me agrees with you. Part of me thinks Yahoo largely bet on all the wrong horses.
Users mostly didn't want directories of web sites and portals (which couldn't really scale anyway), they wanted search.
Microblogging (and individual blogging sites generally) fell out of favor. I consider it a minor miracle that Blogger is still around and Google even did a minor and only somewhat regressive update recently.
Most people didn't really want "serious" photo sites like Flickr. They wanted free social sites dominated by "influencers" like Instagram. (We'll see how long Flickr holds on under a small owner like Smugmug.)
At the time I thought it was superseded by Digg.com, at least in the sense of helping other people discover cool stuff. I had a few articles go viral on delicious... well viral for the time.
Digg is still around, too, but not in a recognizable form. (At least, if there's a way for mere mortals to submit links, I haven't found it.)
I don't disagree. It really was awesome. But whatever you call delicious from Yahoo aquisition onward wasa failure to steward it correctly. If all it took was not messing with it, that was a standard that was not met.
I read that with a nostalgic tone and think, “If that happened, we’d all be up in arms about the power and corruption that Yahoo/Mozilla duopoly wielded”
Let's not forget the exploit vector that it offered. Since they allowed you to export your bookmarks from IE/ Firefox/ Safari, lots of folks would bookmark a paywall site and append the login info (i.e. WSJ L:ABC P:123)
One difference in the fate of Yahoo vis a vis Google, is that Yahoo didn't spy on its users and exploit the knowledge gained from spying to make gazillions from advertising.
Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut.
The rise of advertising everywhere, and the loss of privacy, and the glut of trivia, hatred, and anti-science in the form of Facebook content, have resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago, and is governed by incompetent personalities.
The return of del.icio.us might just be one small step back in the right direction.
Yahoo spied on users the same as the rest of them, they were just incompetent and bled users for years. They were never especially well managed, but Verizon was the worst and basically took a company on the road to destruction and stomped on the accelerator.
> resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago
This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.
I don't know how Yahoo spied on their users, privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s.
But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads.
What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Times have changed, but while you may want 1999 Google back, you probably don't want 1999 Yahoo back.
Google succeeded by making keyword-targeted advertising available to the masses, didn't even need any spying for that at first because search provides the keywords quite naturally.
Yahoo failed by trying to be Where Everyone Comes For Everything and monetize that through traditional big buck ad campaigns.
I’m guessing you never promoted ypn ads or chitika. Yahoo wanted to compete, but had poor execution. To give them credit though, there was a time when they had great tech. I remember when they shutdown yahoo pipes, at the time there wasn’t anything else like it. Yahoo mail was much bigger than gmail for a time as well.
All that talk but forgot to say what Yahoo didn't do - show you what you wanted on the first page. You can run circles around it they just weren't good enough. But sure nostalgia is great and bringing delicious back will be amazinggggg
>a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago
This may come as a shock to some, but it's quite logical when you think about it.
With print advertising, it makes sense. You pay for the space you take up. How do you calculate that? Well, at minimum, the cost of a classified ad for similar space, plus additional fees for processing, graphics, and color.
Online, advertising pricing really doesn't make much sense. The space you have is freely available, there are no printing costs, no special processing requirements, and the readers aren't even likely to be local, unlike the limited distribution networks of most newspapers. It should come as no surprise that online advertising revenue for newspapers is nowhere near its peak of print advertising revenue [1]. Even when a newspaper stops printing and can cut out all the expenses that come with it, there simply isn't enough money to support their existing levels of operation.
Slot-machine of the internet. rage, outrage, xenophobia, name-calling, name-dropping, celebrity, manufactured 140 chars at a time. It's a culture killer.
This is probably one of my favorite developments coming from the quarantine. Maciej Ceglowski is a keeper of the torch reminding us of what the web used to be: a weird place filled with weird people who were guided by curious intellects and a belief that the internet can and would liberate us in some strange and amazing way.
Before social media amplified celebrity worship and extreme positions, everyone's voice on the web was only given weight by the merit or personality of what was said. No matter how popular you were on the old internet your voice was never loud enough to silence another. People were mostly anonymous (in practice because governments were caught off guard) and anyone could start a quirky website that was suddenly the talk of the town.
I miss the old internet that inspired a lot of brilliant and all too idealistic people to code into the night and bring us these amazing innovations. In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open. Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
Thank you Maciej for the trip down memory lane. Some of us may cling to the past but I hope there's another version of you and the old guard of the internet waiting for us or our future generations when we are gone.
> In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open. Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.
When I first got to use Facebook (after it had opened up to more than just users from particular US universities), I loved the fact that it had a cohesive look and feel. The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
But over time I kind of started missing actively visiting the 'page' of a friend, and especially the craziness in how they were able to modify their myspace/cu2/hyves.nl/etc. pages. Sure, it was often ugly as hell, filled with emoji, psychedelic backgrounds, and autoplaying music. but it was /them/ expressing themselves.
I think a lot of what's turned out to be problematic about Facebook (and perhaps the broader internet) is that most platforms have completely locked down people's ability to express themselves to comments and a tiny little profile picture next to it.
That customizability on MySpace was a security nightmare. My wife was the head of the security team back in the day and a lot of what they did to secure the site was duct tape and baling wire. It was kind of entertaining to log onto the hacker forums and see commentary on my wife's work for the day.
> The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
The newsfeed was copied/acquired from FriendFeed. Messages was Beluga. Instagram and WhatsApp got on FB bandwagon too. FB just had the cold hard cash laying there and just had to put it in front of these people. Cold hard cash and no morality when it comes to selling people personal data, but, in their defence, we put that data there in the first place, it's the fuzzy binding contract that's made when one joins Facebook—look at all these social tools for you to share and connect, for the mere price of letting us exploit you and your data and enrich us and our investors while doing that. It's a power structure, really.
> At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.
This is partly because Facebook introduced "the internet" to people who would otherwise never create anything on the web.
I agree that was what I originally disliked about Facebook. But I think a bigger problem (that definitely got worse over time) was the way everything gets swept away on FB. If you see something, it's very difficult to get back to it later. This is demoralizing for the writers too.
Most of the time, I'm here for the text. I really appreciate straight answers in legible fonts. They're a rarity in the age of SEO-optimised, engagement-obsessed websites.
In that sense, I'm happy with platforms that standardise the experience. It's just unfortunate when those platforms add their own layer of annoyances in the name of growth.
> At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.
> The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
At first I liked the newsfeed but looking back I think that's the beginning of what killed Facebook for me. At one time the site was about you. When you logged in you went to your page. Now it's about other people almost exclusively.
Same cloth? Zukerburger was an asshole to begin with, based on the stories told so far. No he’s just behaving with impunity after selling his soul to the Drumpf.
I absolutely loved this when I found it. Delicious was just such a great place to find cool, esoteric stuff.
I love any sites with lists on it made by regular people. Rateyourmusic is the same. Find a band you love, find out who else has an album on their list, get digging.
I ran the full site for about two years after 2017, using the code I inherited from AVOS, but a lot of people assumed the site was dead because they tried to visit delicious.com. That was never part of the sale and has been kept for some unknown purpose.
The problem was that even years after making the site read-only, I couldn't cope with the level of spam traffic directed at delicious, and had constant problems keeping it online. Rewriting that read-only version so it's not a bloated layer cake of 20 services is my attempt at bringing it back online more sustainably.
At what stage in its existence was Facebook in any way open? It was a walled garded from its inception - initially restricting access to college students only. In fact I never did and still do not consider Facebook as "the web". There is the web and then there is Facebook. The two just use similar technologies but live apart.
My personal projects (all too elementary to talk about at this point) are intended to be just that. Not flashy, but functional, they respect your privacy and etc. They are what they are and there's no secret or desire to dump it if it doesn't make $ billion.
I was thinking a while ago of the old "web ring" idea where likeminded sites were all listed together in a ring and you could explore them.
It would be nice if there was a "simple, privacy oriented, sustainable" web ring out there of good projects doing good things for their customers.
> I was thinking a while ago of the old "web ring" idea where likeminded sites were all listed together in a ring and you could explore them.
I think you're right. The best we have now are the "awesome-*" lists. Here is an "aggregation" of the options on offer: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
> Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
I agree with this 100%. I'm old enough to remember when the internet worked fine without having advertising everywhere. Now we're supposed to be convinced that the whole thing would cease to exist if there weren't popover ads and auto playing videos. :/
> In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open.
"I" created Facebook in 1999. The commpany I worked for wanted a "networked solution for all and everyone." Not big enough market, bad timing etc. So there you have it; timing is _everything_.
To get to that point the trick was to build it as something else first, and then switch. Myspace was primarily a platform for bands, which are fun and cool, which contributed to its early success.
Jwz:
> Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
Not to rain on the parade, but serious question: are bookmarks actually useful anymore?
It's funny, I'm trying to remember when I simply stopped using bookmarks. 5 years ago, maybe? 10? I'm not entirely sure. I used to have elaborate folder hierachies of bookmarks in my browser.
But at some point, I realized anytime I needed something, it was faster to just type a keyword or two in the address bar. Either it was there in my history, autosuggested, or my search engine would find it. So maybe it was when Chrome debuted the Omnibox?
I suppose it was around the same time I started primarily accessing files on my computer/drive with search (Drive, Spotlight) rather than navigating folders.
A few years later, I stopped organizing my 1000's of tracks into playlists by mood/theme, because now I can just think of a single track I'm in the mood for, and start a Spotify Radio based on that track.
In other words: I no longer extensively curate, because you just don't have to anymore, beyond a kind of bare minimum (a few project folders, a mega "favorite tracks" playlist).
So I guess I'm just curious: Delicious was wonderful when it existed. But even if it were brought back, is it a service people need anymore? Or have we moved on to a new paradigm?
I currently have 13,229 bookmarks in Pinboard.in. They are all cross referenced with multiple useful tags and I add maybe 3+ every day.
Google is a poor substitute because it gives me pages of results for what I need and they may or may not be any good. I may have to search again. I may have to click through 4 or five pages before i find one that's useful even though i've been to a useful one before.
Searching in my bookmarks gives me ones that are KNOWN useful, AND because of Pinboard's archival feature they are still available even after the site has disappeared.
I bookmark things _I_ find useful and things I think will be likely be useful to the people in my circles. Then when a friend says "hey is there a good tool for x?" I can say "yes, and here's a link to it" even if i don't use that tool. Or, i can link them to full pages of useful bookmarks on a topic.
So yeah, I have thousands of curated links of _useful_ things and pieces of information that are on the internet or _were_ on the internet. I use it daily. I share links with others regularly. I'm constantly thankful when i can read the content of that blog post I bookmarked that described X better than anything currently out there... but no longer exists on the internet. It's also great for research. I can make a new tag for some topic I'm gathering info on (maybe competitors for a future project) and when i am ready to start processing that info i have a whole list of easily accessible links to go through.
re "is it a service people need anymore?" Note that the reason the thing that started off this discussion exists is because enough people are paying him money to use Pinboard.in that he was able to spend unknown thousands of dollars on Delicious for the SOLE purpose of shuttering it and putting it in read-only mode. He probably got some users who transferred their accounts to Pinboard.in out of the deal, but that wasn't his primary goal by all accounts.
Yeah, active Pinboard user as well, coming from del.icio.us a number of years ago. Have 35,549 bookmarks in Pinboard as of right now, will almost certainly be a bit higher by the end of the day. Definitely a personal knowledge repository. I can't tell you how many times I'll be talking to someone and say, "You know, I read an article about that a few months back... let me send you the link" - really useful. I also like when I save a really good link and see that others have linked it too, and then I can explore what else those folks have bookmarked with that same tag; it's a great way to find other high-quality pages. Kind of "social bookmarking" :)
I tried pinboard archival account but decided to request refund because it uses iframe, which prevent my annotating tool to work (Memex 2), also prevents full text search for Medium posts.
Other aspect that I consider is the lack of nice iOS app.
Now I use Raindrop.io, and eventhough the iOS app is not that great, but it allow full text search for Medium account.
My question is, can you check Pinboard's archival account feature on whether it still use iframe, and whether you can do full text search on Medium posts?
Thank you!
Thanks for sharing. Random thoughts/questions: How do you compare this with using Google Chrome's ecosystem with bookmarks? Or any other browser with bookmarks stored in the cloud? Is there any plugin that can allow search results in a browser's address bar to show the bookmarks from pinboard.in?
Try to search for anything more than a couple of years old on Google and you will have a very difficult time.
That said, the "just search for it" paradigm is the correct way to think about bookmarking, as Joshua Schachter taught me. Bookmarking sites just take care of the haystack for you so the various needles you want to find later don't disappear.
I can see it being helpful for random domains one might forget. For large websites, like reddit, searching within that site is usually pretty accurate (for me).
I've been finding lately that as overall web usability declines, ive been relying on bookmarks more. For example, at work I can never navigate jira correctly to the page I want, so I have a bookmark. Twitter shows tweets out of order and from random people I don't follow, so I have a bookmark to the search page with a query to have people I follow sorted by date. I too haven't used bookmarks for years until recently discovering that it's the easiest way to "hack" a bad service.
I tend to view Pinboard principally as a way to search more effectively. It's especially valuable because a lot of the things I find on the internet and want to be able to refer to later are PDFs of scans of old documents, and other kinds of things that don't really index well for searching. Basically by putting it into Pinboard and adding some metadata manually (like a correct title and description) I'm preserving my ability to easily find it via search later.
It's also been a valuable way to work with resources that I found years ago and then forgot about. Since I tag things by subject area sometimes just going through a subject tag I see some random person's personal website with extensive notes on the history of something... I found it several years ago and probably wouldn't have remembered it without having it saved.
> Not to rain on the parade, but serious question: are bookmarks actually useful anymore?
I would go one step further and say that the problem isn't losing URLs but losing content.
I have most of my bookmarks from delicious exported and saved locally now, but most of the links from the 2005-2010 era are now broken and even with something like Pocket or archive.org, it's impossible to find those old blog posts and articles anywhere. These days, I just print things to PDF and save them rather than risking articles get lost over time.
Pinboard.in offers a pro account that will archive pages when you bookmark them. Won't help for the old lost stuff but will help for everything else going forwards. Also, it's a lot easier than manually exporting everything as pdf.
I think we have shifted to a new paradigm. People are now less likely to host their own sites and own their content. Facebook especially has made walled gardens of user generated content that cannot be discovered outside of Facebook. And now even Google is taking their path by scraping content and displaying that and ads for most of the search page. Then even content that is displayed as a result it is going through Google hosted services to "speed it up"
Delicious was around as user curated sites and forums started to wane. So it did provide discovery for them. It was like even older days at the dawn of the web when one went to Yahoo to find the best site on working out in a human curated directory rather than horrible keyword searches. We do need that still especially now that Google has pivoted to being "doing evil" and is doing things that are against their open web practices of the past. So now even with a great search engine, discovering curated content is less and less possible as they are scraping it and burying it.
But as much as I'd like to see that I fear it isn't going to happen. People are less likely to create things out of these silos like social media platforms because they aren't going to be discovered. So then there's less discoverable great independent content, and then less of a case for bookmarking...
I am working on something similar. Bookmarks are still usable because Google is pretty bad for some obscure queries and they work as a reminder more for me.
Search engines require active discovery. You can find most of the links posted here on HN. Why have HN?
It's curated, have social elements and passive. You just sit back and click rather than coming up with something interesting to search for.
I am still surprised google hasn't come up with a passive consumption of their search engine. It seems like something they can do. Google feed doesn't have social elements to it so I wouldn't count it in. Google Plus was a failure.
I've been doing a lot of cooking. Trying to find anything you've found searching for recipes is just wading through a swamp of blogs, spam, and impractical nonsense. If you find anything you want to try, you'll never find it again.
On the other hand, if I tag all the stuff I might consider in pinboard with my own descriptions, I'm starting with a subset that's just the 4-5 pages I was looking at before.
Well Pocket can be handy. Gave yourself a 5 minute break at work and find a few interesting articles that threaten to suck you in? Save them to Pocket and read them at home.
I bookmark pages in Chrome because they show up higher than non-bookmarked pages in auto suggestions. I sometimes search within my bookmarks, but never organize/browse them the way I did 20 years ago.
I use a bookmark service near daily. It's valuable when you have multiple machines and you prefer not to give Google all your bookmarks to sync through their servers.
I never used delicious, but bookmarks as a general concept - keeping a URL stored somewhere for later use - I can't live without.
I use chrome for day-to-day bookmarks and some google sheets for other bookmarks.
Whether a dedicated bookmark site is useful, I don't find it useful, but some might. Especially if they don't use the same computer all the time like I do.
Like others here, I have 10,000+ bookmarks on pinboard and add several daily. I can be on any number of computers, iPad, phone at any given time so an online, centralized database of sites, personally tagged, is extremely useful.
Absolutely yes.
These days if I see an interesting content on my phone, I share to Google Keep. Periodically I look in keep and take another pass at what I saved.
If you find yourself binging it more than once a week, bookmark it? Crtl-B brings up Firefox's bookmark sidebar and you can just search it there as immediately.
i use pinboard as a replacement for bookmarks because I am on multiple devices and because of the tagging. I use it with keywords to save links to projects I"m working on or even want to read later. I also use the address bar's history for things too but those are things I go to on a daily basis. pinboard is for things I will get to in a day or a week.
Hey Joshua! Many years ago I saw you give a presentation about del.icio.us at a web conference in London (forgot the name, organized by a guy called Ryan?)
I'd just started learning web development and going through a career change in to that world. In your presentation you came across laid back and totally unpretentious, explaining how you dropped a corporate career to focus on the site, of which I was a user at the time and loved.
You explained how you dealt with the tagging of content, that was one of the subtleties you had to figure out. And I remember you mentioning nagios. The way you explained it all made it seem pretty straightforward and fun (at the time, hope I'm not getting this wrong).
For a long time that talk, your project (and a few others) were very inspirational to me, to see how one guy could build something so awesome and be pretty successful. Stories like yours gave me a lot of drive when I was still a total noob.
Fifteen years later I'm up to my neck in code, just as driven as then and still chasing that dream. That's it, just wanted to say thanks!
I had to laugh about the guy in charge of development and rewriting it as a SPA:
> we concluded that it would be quicker to re-write the app as opposed to dissecting the exiting application codebase. This is the primary reason why stacks were canned, regardless of what others might have said. Many times rewrites require reducing features in order to build a new foundation. This is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not.
And then the pinpoard guy just summarizes the frustration of countless users:
> But the biggest mistake was when AVOS turned off some features beloved by a core Delicious constituency, fanfic authors. In particular, they made it impossible to search on the "/" character in tags, which instantly rendered a lot of the elaborate fanfic tagging and classification scheme useless. In my mind, that's when Delicious hit the point of no return.
It never went away. If you want experience similar to Google Reader - there are several clients (but better ones require paid subscription). RSS feeds are still there.
ActivityStreams is essentially a revival of RSS. It is the foundation of stuff like ActivityPub, the Fediverse, and the upcoming Social Linked Data (SoLiD) effort led by the W3C. So I'd say that there's plenty of reviving going on.
NNW is fast and simple. Using it, I've come to feel that RSS doesn't need to be updated -- it just needs modernised tooling and a frictionless UX. Now I have a good reader, I spend as much time reading feeds as I do on social media. And I feel good about spending time reading and skimming, knowing that there isn't an engagement algorithm which is trying to steer me towards extreme responses.
Newsletters are the new RSS. Different protocol, but simpler for non-technical users and a viable business model. Some recent apps (Stoop and HEY) make the reading experience more like traditional RSS readers too.
What a hero — love how the story of Pinboard stacks up against the long-term unsustainability of VC-funded and overhyped startups. Quote from the 2011 article[0]:
"My dream is to keep this a one-person project," says Ceglowski. "I am competing against billionaires like the YouTube guys running Delicious and I can hold my own. The tools I use have gotten so good and they are the same ones that Yahoo and Google use."
It does seem like there might be room out there for things that aren't unicorns, but are sustainable / good products that can operate, even at a profit, with small teams.
I always think of / mention Gumroad when I think of that:
I worry in the rush to the tip top we lose some good products / services / economic activity that are billion dollar wins... but are still way good ideas.
The tooling has become insanely good, so long as you trust the shoulders of the giants you’re standing on. For example, a month ago the Electron team introduced a bug that made my Microsoft Store app think it was outside the store. The users of my app were not happy - so I looked into how I could test the app “in the store” as a beta ... it’s basically an exercise in frustration. Package flights are a joke, build numbers don’t make a package unique. Just all sorts of hassle for a store that’s 1% (I’m being generous) the size of Apple’s.
Anywho, I’m a solo developer that created a desktop electron app that lets you design and print labels (either roll or sheets) and can import spreadsheet data for use in text, barcodes and even colors. It’s been a hell of a ride so far because my customers run the gamut of “organizing my yarn” to “storing nuclear isotopes.” I get emails and calls like, “I need to print 15,000 labels by Tuesday or I’m fired!” Those are always fun. My customers are in my small town of Minnesota USA, California, UAE, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia, NZ. I have global reach in this funky little niche.
All this made possible by some insane tooling (and toiling). It’s a really fun time to be a developer... even if my app takes up 500MB memory. Ha!
My current project is a service for writers that at best might be able to provide me with a full-time income and at least will not lose money for me. Since it's something I want/need/use, I'm willing to donate my time to it as necessary and let it be what it'll be.
I mean vanilla stuff like MySQL and PHP. In the Old Times both were considered toy projects unworthy of running a production website, while now both have been patched and improved into complete stability.
He has some (funny) info on Pinboard About page (https://pinboard.in/about) regarding 'the technology', perhaps he was mentioning that...
> Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!
Your Songsling project seems really interesting but not fully understanding how it works. Are you generating a site+server and uploading it to the "linked" domains? Is "linking" asking for some kind of upload/write access to their host?
Thanks! It works through DNS — you point your domain’s nameservers to Songsling, then it manages all the other necessary records automatically behind the scenes. Basically it points the domain at the generated site. It’s still early, rough around the edges, but slowly getting there. The new audio engine that’s in the works is on a whole another level, focusing mostly on that at the moment.
There are a lot of room for open source improvements when it comes to bookmark management. I envision a CLI and web server that uses TOML, YAML and JSON like Hugo.
I'm doing the same thing with Subreply against Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Mastodon. There are others like me: GoatCounter, Micro.blog, Midnight.pub, Lobste.rs, etc.
I'm looking at Subreply, and notice you said it's English-only on the about page. Is that something you enforce? What's your reasoning if you don't mind my asking?
Someone just saw a parking page and it ends up on HN. I'm not sure why.
But I'm bringing it back online with a pre-Yahoo design in a few days, once I finish stomping the bigger bugs.
I run a for-profit bookmarking service based off of early del.icio.us so you can take a guess as to whether O.G. delicious will be read/write or read-only.
For those who did not experience it, del.icio.us was a bookmarking service, and one of the first to have "tags", but also had a sense of fresh discovery. You can bookmark and tag your sites. But you can also browse the bookmarks and tags of people you know, and people they know, getting deeper, freed from algorithmic manipulation. Like Wikipedia, but you start at you.
Delicious, Digg, StumbledUpon and slashdot were my main fresh content feed back in the days, found so many useful articles and fun websites through them...
At some point I started searching directly in del.icio.us over google because it would give me higher quality results. I guess someone bookmarking a site was proof enough it was useful.
Sadly that never lasts for long. Fake users trickle in, exploitative bookmarks get added, then it all goes to shit, much like the search-driven web did in general.
100%. Loved how anything you could reach navigating it with a browser could also be exported to RSS. Around 2007 I had kind of my own personal video podcast by subscribing to the del.icio.us video tag on iTunes for example
Was there a way to find people with the same link(s)? I don't think I'm going to get anybody I know starting to use this again, but I'm going to try it out.
Yes you could see who had bookmarked what you had and how many people had bookmarked it.
Every now and then I would take something I had bookmarked that was not widely bookmarked and go through the people who had bookmarked it like me to find relevant stuff under the tag they had bookmarked it. Was a great way to find new content.
Back in 2006 I actually had a moment where I overheard someone at a university talking about an obscure subject (synthetic biology) I had spent the last couple of years saving del.icio.us links about.
We soon had this conversation:
Wait! Are you so-and-so?
Dude, how did you know?
We've been saving all the same links to del.icio.us!
I had just finished a rotation in one of the handful of labs in the world that worked on this subject, and he had arrived to do a junior year summer internship in the same lab. Incidentally we both were led astray, in some sense, by all the Web 2.0 idealism of tools like del.icio.us; neither of us fit in in academic biology. He even took it to the extreme of opening a nonprofit to support DIY, "open source" biology ... (So very late-aughts!)
Hi, my name is Maciej Ceglowski, the latest (and hopefully last) owner of del.icio.us.
The site will be back online soon. If you had data stored on del.icio.us after 2010, you'll be able to export it here.
If you had data on the site before 2010, whether I still have it depends on whether you completed the "opt-in" process in 2011, when Yahoo transferred the site to AVOS.
I'll do my best to get everything I can back online this summer!
They did, and let it rot, before shutting it down. At the time it seemed like a huge waste. But perhaps, if you can escape becoming the yahoo/AOL/etc homepage, you have a chance to live again.
Readit News
I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service, and a better-executed alliance with Mozilla and rode them into prominence and relevance.
All the pieces were there, just the management vision appears not to have been.
1. Niceness - a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work (not WFH, just disappear occasionally). I took it to management, and was told we don’t want to hurt his feelings.
2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered.
Afterwards I tried to estimate the cost to Yahoo of the time of the dozen or so people, including one of the founders, and I don't remember my estimate, but I do remember it was many times the cost of the server.
[1] yes, Yahoo had multiple billing teams - that's a story in itself; my team existed almost entirely to protect the European businesses against the perceived inability of the US billing team to accept and respect the requirements of the European business. Of course we couldn't admit that to the US team, so my job was basically to repeatedly refuse to surrender an inch in terms of customer requirements whenever the US team tried to convince us to move something over to the US platform.
I personally I believe Hadoop took off at Yahoo because it was a way of getting computing resources that did not need to go through the committees. Big Data? Map Reduce? Less important than simply getting a machine to do things on even if it was just the gateway node (the game of trying gateway nodes till one wasn't at 100% cpu was always fun).
Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.
https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-hone...
out of the context provided, this sounds likes like none of your business?
Digg was originally modelled on the "popular" section of Delicious, an example of building a product out of a feature. Then Reddit saw a huge boost from the eventual Digg community exodus, after a time when Digg itself was the cultural nerve centre.
Delicious turning into Twitter or Reddit would have been a real loss.
"But it doesn't scale!" is practically a mantra for HN, but scalability is fairly low on the list of values for me. I'd rather have interesting websites than big websites, and I'd rather see websites go bankrupt than compromise their values. The reason I care that Delicious might come back is that it was still interesting when it went down last. Digg and Slashdot still exist, but frankly I care so little that I actually had to look up that fact, and after verifying that they existed, I clicked away.
I don't mean to suggest it would have been similar to them culturally, or that it would have evolved into a copy of reddit or twitter. It would have still been delicious, in the sense that it would always be a booking service (as long as they never went all in with Delicious Stacks, which I think nobody remembers except me). I also don't doubt that, at some point, it probably would sell it's soul and lose whatever signature personality it had according to the main users. But it would have remained useful, grown, and been one of the main places everybody goes.
Even with the loses you identify, it was an invaluable asset that could have kept Yahoo relevant.
Users mostly didn't want directories of web sites and portals (which couldn't really scale anyway), they wanted search.
Microblogging (and individual blogging sites generally) fell out of favor. I consider it a minor miracle that Blogger is still around and Google even did a minor and only somewhat regressive update recently.
Most people didn't really want "serious" photo sites like Flickr. They wanted free social sites dominated by "influencers" like Instagram. (We'll see how long Flickr holds on under a small owner like Smugmug.)
Digg is still around, too, but not in a recognizable form. (At least, if there's a way for mere mortals to submit links, I haven't found it.)
Delicious was pretty much perfect as it was. Morphing into something like a Twitter or Reddit would not have been a move in a positive direction.
Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut.
The rise of advertising everywhere, and the loss of privacy, and the glut of trivia, hatred, and anti-science in the form of Facebook content, have resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago, and is governed by incompetent personalities.
The return of del.icio.us might just be one small step back in the right direction.
> resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago
This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.
But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads.
What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Times have changed, but while you may want 1999 Google back, you probably don't want 1999 Yahoo back.
Yahoo failed by trying to be Where Everyone Comes For Everything and monetize that through traditional big buck ad campaigns.
This may come as a shock to some, but it's quite logical when you think about it.
With print advertising, it makes sense. You pay for the space you take up. How do you calculate that? Well, at minimum, the cost of a classified ad for similar space, plus additional fees for processing, graphics, and color.
Online, advertising pricing really doesn't make much sense. The space you have is freely available, there are no printing costs, no special processing requirements, and the readers aren't even likely to be local, unlike the limited distribution networks of most newspapers. It should come as no surprise that online advertising revenue for newspapers is nowhere near its peak of print advertising revenue [1]. Even when a newspaper stops printing and can cut out all the expenses that come with it, there simply isn't enough money to support their existing levels of operation.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/this-is...
Slot-machine of the internet. rage, outrage, xenophobia, name-calling, name-dropping, celebrity, manufactured 140 chars at a time. It's a culture killer.
> July 15, 2020
> Hi, my name is Maciej Ceglowski, the latest (and hopefully last) owner of del.icio.us.
> The site will be back online soon. If you had data stored on del.icio.us after 2010, you'll be able to export it here.
> [...]
> You can reach me at maciej@ceglowski.com
I also hope the site will be back online.
Deleted Comment
Before social media amplified celebrity worship and extreme positions, everyone's voice on the web was only given weight by the merit or personality of what was said. No matter how popular you were on the old internet your voice was never loud enough to silence another. People were mostly anonymous (in practice because governments were caught off guard) and anyone could start a quirky website that was suddenly the talk of the town.
I miss the old internet that inspired a lot of brilliant and all too idealistic people to code into the night and bring us these amazing innovations. In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open. Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
Thank you Maciej for the trip down memory lane. Some of us may cling to the past but I hope there's another version of you and the old guard of the internet waiting for us or our future generations when we are gone.
At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.
When I first got to use Facebook (after it had opened up to more than just users from particular US universities), I loved the fact that it had a cohesive look and feel. The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
But over time I kind of started missing actively visiting the 'page' of a friend, and especially the craziness in how they were able to modify their myspace/cu2/hyves.nl/etc. pages. Sure, it was often ugly as hell, filled with emoji, psychedelic backgrounds, and autoplaying music. but it was /them/ expressing themselves.
I think a lot of what's turned out to be problematic about Facebook (and perhaps the broader internet) is that most platforms have completely locked down people's ability to express themselves to comments and a tiny little profile picture next to it.
The newsfeed was copied/acquired from FriendFeed. Messages was Beluga. Instagram and WhatsApp got on FB bandwagon too. FB just had the cold hard cash laying there and just had to put it in front of these people. Cold hard cash and no morality when it comes to selling people personal data, but, in their defence, we put that data there in the first place, it's the fuzzy binding contract that's made when one joins Facebook—look at all these social tools for you to share and connect, for the mere price of letting us exploit you and your data and enrich us and our investors while doing that. It's a power structure, really.
This is partly because Facebook introduced "the internet" to people who would otherwise never create anything on the web.
Most of the time, I'm here for the text. I really appreciate straight answers in legible fonts. They're a rarity in the age of SEO-optimised, engagement-obsessed websites.
In that sense, I'm happy with platforms that standardise the experience. It's just unfortunate when those platforms add their own layer of annoyances in the name of growth.
> The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
At first I liked the newsfeed but looking back I think that's the beginning of what killed Facebook for me. At one time the site was about you. When you logged in you went to your page. Now it's about other people almost exclusively.
> to comments
Hope springs eternal for the freespeecher.
I love any sites with lists on it made by regular people. Rateyourmusic is the same. Find a band you love, find out who else has an album on their list, get digging.
Same with Delicious. I was gutted when it shut.
Maciej bought Delicious in 2017 and always planned to let people recover their bookmarks.
The problem was that even years after making the site read-only, I couldn't cope with the level of spam traffic directed at delicious, and had constant problems keeping it online. Rewriting that read-only version so it's not a bloated layer cake of 20 services is my attempt at bringing it back online more sustainably.
I was thinking a while ago of the old "web ring" idea where likeminded sites were all listed together in a ring and you could explore them.
It would be nice if there was a "simple, privacy oriented, sustainable" web ring out there of good projects doing good things for their customers.
I think you're right. The best we have now are the "awesome-*" lists. Here is an "aggregation" of the options on offer: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
I agree with this 100%. I'm old enough to remember when the internet worked fine without having advertising everywhere. Now we're supposed to be convinced that the whole thing would cease to exist if there weren't popover ads and auto playing videos. :/
"I" created Facebook in 1999. The commpany I worked for wanted a "networked solution for all and everyone." Not big enough market, bad timing etc. So there you have it; timing is _everything_.
To get to that point the trick was to build it as something else first, and then switch. Myspace was primarily a platform for bands, which are fun and cool, which contributed to its early success.
Jwz:
> Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
And Facebook was ENTIRELY this initially.
Down to the lack of TLS even (or maybe I should say SSL -- XD)!
Dead Comment
It's funny, I'm trying to remember when I simply stopped using bookmarks. 5 years ago, maybe? 10? I'm not entirely sure. I used to have elaborate folder hierachies of bookmarks in my browser.
But at some point, I realized anytime I needed something, it was faster to just type a keyword or two in the address bar. Either it was there in my history, autosuggested, or my search engine would find it. So maybe it was when Chrome debuted the Omnibox?
I suppose it was around the same time I started primarily accessing files on my computer/drive with search (Drive, Spotlight) rather than navigating folders.
A few years later, I stopped organizing my 1000's of tracks into playlists by mood/theme, because now I can just think of a single track I'm in the mood for, and start a Spotify Radio based on that track.
In other words: I no longer extensively curate, because you just don't have to anymore, beyond a kind of bare minimum (a few project folders, a mega "favorite tracks" playlist).
So I guess I'm just curious: Delicious was wonderful when it existed. But even if it were brought back, is it a service people need anymore? Or have we moved on to a new paradigm?
Today there's no similarly popular equivalent. Sure general-purpose social URL bookmarking sites still exist but they're niche, not mainstream.
So thanks for trying to invalidate my question, but it's not that simple.
Google is a poor substitute because it gives me pages of results for what I need and they may or may not be any good. I may have to search again. I may have to click through 4 or five pages before i find one that's useful even though i've been to a useful one before.
Searching in my bookmarks gives me ones that are KNOWN useful, AND because of Pinboard's archival feature they are still available even after the site has disappeared.
I bookmark things _I_ find useful and things I think will be likely be useful to the people in my circles. Then when a friend says "hey is there a good tool for x?" I can say "yes, and here's a link to it" even if i don't use that tool. Or, i can link them to full pages of useful bookmarks on a topic.
So yeah, I have thousands of curated links of _useful_ things and pieces of information that are on the internet or _were_ on the internet. I use it daily. I share links with others regularly. I'm constantly thankful when i can read the content of that blog post I bookmarked that described X better than anything currently out there... but no longer exists on the internet. It's also great for research. I can make a new tag for some topic I'm gathering info on (maybe competitors for a future project) and when i am ready to start processing that info i have a whole list of easily accessible links to go through.
re "is it a service people need anymore?" Note that the reason the thing that started off this discussion exists is because enough people are paying him money to use Pinboard.in that he was able to spend unknown thousands of dollars on Delicious for the SOLE purpose of shuttering it and putting it in read-only mode. He probably got some users who transferred their accounts to Pinboard.in out of the deal, but that wasn't his primary goal by all accounts.
Now I use Raindrop.io, and eventhough the iOS app is not that great, but it allow full text search for Medium account.
My question is, can you check Pinboard's archival account feature on whether it still use iframe, and whether you can do full text search on Medium posts? Thank you!
That said, the "just search for it" paradigm is the correct way to think about bookmarking, as Joshua Schachter taught me. Bookmarking sites just take care of the haystack for you so the various needles you want to find later don't disappear.
It's also been a valuable way to work with resources that I found years ago and then forgot about. Since I tag things by subject area sometimes just going through a subject tag I see some random person's personal website with extensive notes on the history of something... I found it several years ago and probably wouldn't have remembered it without having it saved.
I would go one step further and say that the problem isn't losing URLs but losing content.
I have most of my bookmarks from delicious exported and saved locally now, but most of the links from the 2005-2010 era are now broken and even with something like Pocket or archive.org, it's impossible to find those old blog posts and articles anywhere. These days, I just print things to PDF and save them rather than risking articles get lost over time.
Delicious was around as user curated sites and forums started to wane. So it did provide discovery for them. It was like even older days at the dawn of the web when one went to Yahoo to find the best site on working out in a human curated directory rather than horrible keyword searches. We do need that still especially now that Google has pivoted to being "doing evil" and is doing things that are against their open web practices of the past. So now even with a great search engine, discovering curated content is less and less possible as they are scraping it and burying it.
But as much as I'd like to see that I fear it isn't going to happen. People are less likely to create things out of these silos like social media platforms because they aren't going to be discovered. So then there's less discoverable great independent content, and then less of a case for bookmarking...
Search engines require active discovery. You can find most of the links posted here on HN. Why have HN?
It's curated, have social elements and passive. You just sit back and click rather than coming up with something interesting to search for.
I am still surprised google hasn't come up with a passive consumption of their search engine. It seems like something they can do. Google feed doesn't have social elements to it so I wouldn't count it in. Google Plus was a failure.
I've been doing a lot of cooking. Trying to find anything you've found searching for recipes is just wading through a swamp of blogs, spam, and impractical nonsense. If you find anything you want to try, you'll never find it again.
On the other hand, if I tag all the stuff I might consider in pinboard with my own descriptions, I'm starting with a subset that's just the 4-5 pages I was looking at before.
Well Pocket can be handy. Gave yourself a 5 minute break at work and find a few interesting articles that threaten to suck you in? Save them to Pocket and read them at home.
I use chrome for day-to-day bookmarks and some google sheets for other bookmarks.
Whether a dedicated bookmark site is useful, I don't find it useful, but some might. Especially if they don't use the same computer all the time like I do.
After some digging, the above thread seemed like the most informative one as to what happened to Delicious (with a top comment from joshu, no less).
I'd just started learning web development and going through a career change in to that world. In your presentation you came across laid back and totally unpretentious, explaining how you dropped a corporate career to focus on the site, of which I was a user at the time and loved.
You explained how you dealt with the tagging of content, that was one of the subtleties you had to figure out. And I remember you mentioning nagios. The way you explained it all made it seem pretty straightforward and fun (at the time, hope I'm not getting this wrong).
For a long time that talk, your project (and a few others) were very inspirational to me, to see how one guy could build something so awesome and be pretty successful. Stories like yours gave me a lot of drive when I was still a total noob.
Fifteen years later I'm up to my neck in code, just as driven as then and still chasing that dream. That's it, just wanted to say thanks!
So what do you think, does del.ico.us can have a second run under Pinboard creator?
> we concluded that it would be quicker to re-write the app as opposed to dissecting the exiting application codebase. This is the primary reason why stacks were canned, regardless of what others might have said. Many times rewrites require reducing features in order to build a new foundation. This is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not.
And then the pinpoard guy just summarizes the frustration of countless users:
> But the biggest mistake was when AVOS turned off some features beloved by a core Delicious constituency, fanfic authors. In particular, they made it impossible to search on the "/" character in tags, which instantly rendered a lot of the elaborate fanfic tagging and classification scheme useless. In my mind, that's when Delicious hit the point of no return.
https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
NNW is fast and simple. Using it, I've come to feel that RSS doesn't need to be updated -- it just needs modernised tooling and a frictionless UX. Now I have a good reader, I spend as much time reading feeds as I do on social media. And I feel good about spending time reading and skimming, knowing that there isn't an engagement algorithm which is trying to steer me towards extreme responses.
RSS.
What I can't figure out is why there's a persistent myth that RSS has somehow vanished from the internet...
"My dream is to keep this a one-person project," says Ceglowski. "I am competing against billionaires like the YouTube guys running Delicious and I can hold my own. The tools I use have gotten so good and they are the same ones that Yahoo and Google use."
I hope to do the same one day with Soundcloud!
[0] http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...
I always think of / mention Gumroad when I think of that:
https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting
I worry in the rush to the tip top we lose some good products / services / economic activity that are billion dollar wins... but are still way good ideas.
Anywho, I’m a solo developer that created a desktop electron app that lets you design and print labels (either roll or sheets) and can import spreadsheet data for use in text, barcodes and even colors. It’s been a hell of a ride so far because my customers run the gamut of “organizing my yarn” to “storing nuclear isotopes.” I get emails and calls like, “I need to print 15,000 labels by Tuesday or I’m fired!” Those are always fun. My customers are in my small town of Minnesota USA, California, UAE, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia, NZ. I have global reach in this funky little niche.
All this made possible by some insane tooling (and toiling). It’s a really fun time to be a developer... even if my app takes up 500MB memory. Ha!
You can download my app from https://label.live
> Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!
1. entirely made-up number
https://songsling.studio/
hilarious :)
But I'm bringing it back online with a pre-Yahoo design in a few days, once I finish stomping the bigger bugs.
I run a for-profit bookmarking service based off of early del.icio.us so you can take a guess as to whether O.G. delicious will be read/write or read-only.
For those who did not experience it, del.icio.us was a bookmarking service, and one of the first to have "tags", but also had a sense of fresh discovery. You can bookmark and tag your sites. But you can also browse the bookmarks and tags of people you know, and people they know, getting deeper, freed from algorithmic manipulation. Like Wikipedia, but you start at you.
Delicious, Digg, Technorati, StumbledUpon - those were the days!
StumbleUpon
I have very fond memories of spending hours clicking 'stumble' during the early years of high school.
No algorithms. What a refreshing idea!
Every now and then I would take something I had bookmarked that was not widely bookmarked and go through the people who had bookmarked it like me to find relevant stuff under the tag they had bookmarked it. Was a great way to find new content.
We soon had this conversation:
Wait! Are you so-and-so?
Dude, how did you know?
We've been saving all the same links to del.icio.us!
I had just finished a rotation in one of the handful of labs in the world that worked on this subject, and he had arrived to do a junior year summer internship in the same lab. Incidentally we both were led astray, in some sense, by all the Web 2.0 idealism of tools like del.icio.us; neither of us fit in in academic biology. He even took it to the extreme of opening a nonprofit to support DIY, "open source" biology ... (So very late-aughts!)
In particular, I think it was del.icio.us that introduced or at least popularized "tag clouds".
I now am using google keep, but if Ceglowski can bring back and freshen up the old del.icio.us, I will switch over.
Now... somebody resurrect google reader :-)
July 15, 2020
Hi, my name is Maciej Ceglowski, the latest (and hopefully last) owner of del.icio.us.
The site will be back online soon. If you had data stored on del.icio.us after 2010, you'll be able to export it here.
If you had data on the site before 2010, whether I still have it depends on whether you completed the "opt-in" process in 2011, when Yahoo transferred the site to AVOS.
I'll do my best to get everything I can back online this summer!
You can reach me at maciej@ceglowski.com