There's been uncertainty over the future of "social bookmarking" site Delicious since Yahoo! leaked slides showing that it was going to be "sunsetted" by Yahoo! a while ago. Sunsetting is one of those euphemisms like "crossing over the rainbow bridge" that make the underlying activity even more sinister; in Delicious' case it meant being sold to people who alienated the user base with weird T&Cs, and have since made the site considerably less useful: to me at any rate.
At Torchbox we used Delicious a lot for our "show and tell" sessions: people would tag links during the week, and every week or two we'd have a round-up meeting based on the tag. We knew that anything from the past couple of weeks wouldn't have been seen yet, so it was easy to track the bookmarks down via an RSS feed. This was the last big thing we'd use Delicious for regularly; when the site was sold and changed, the sorting algorithm was changed too. Now, if a random stranger re-submits your URL, the bookmark seems to suddenly become brand new again. This basically broke our usage of it, where we required older links to stay older so we knew when our weekly catch-up was done.
The eagle-eyed amongst you (well, amongst the few that actually read this blog on my website and not via a feed) will have spotted that my link top-right to "Delicious" now points to "Pinboard", which is a neat competitor to Delicious that everyone's been telling me about for ages. It's a paid-for service, which - despite its incredibly low cost of $9-something, up from $7 a year or so ago - has ended up being a minor barrier to entry for me.
Sadly, Pinboard doesn't have quite the number of "cool social tools" that Delicious used to sport - being able to suggest links to other people, for example - but then they're gradually becoming less worth using in Delicious these days anyway. Most of the link sharing I do is via my Twitter account, and that lets me decouple the social framework from the bookmarking tool. Which feels wrong, given how nice it was in Delicious; but then look where that's got me.
Pinboard has become the first ever website I've paid for, for the slightly ephemeral service alone. I'm user jpstacey, which gives me the nice, hackable URL of http://pinboard.in/u:jpstacey . Goodbye, Delicious: and, genuinely, thank you; but it's time to move on.
