Tag: acquisition

Categories
Applications Semantic Web

The curious announcement that Pinboard has acquired Delicious

Library cards by Sanwal Deen

I’m not sure what to make of the announcement that Pinboard has acquired Delicious.

This is what is going to happen:

If you’re a Pinboard user, nothing will change. Sad!

If you’re a Delicious user, you will have to find another place to save your bookmarks. The site will stay online. but on June 15, I will put Delicious into read-only mode. You won’t be able to save new bookmarks after that date, or use the API.

Users will have an opportunity to migrate their bookmarks to a Pinboard account, which costs $11/year. Those who prefer to bookmark elsewhere will be able to export their data once I fix the export link, which was disabled some months ago for peformance (sic) reasons.

Please note that there is no time pressure for moving off Delicious. You won’t be able to save new bookmarks after June 15, but everything else will continue to work, or break in familiar ways.

As for the ultimate fate of the site, I’ll have more to say about that soon. Delicious has over a billion bookmarks and is a fascinating piece of web history. Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard to keep Delicious down. I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.

I used Delicious back in the day when it was del.icio.us (or something like that) and it was a great service then. I migrated to Pinboard a few years ago. It works well and I’m happy to pay the annual fee (currently $11 per year) to have a reliable bookmarking service.

Delicious didn’t seem to be going anywhere and if Maciej Ceglowski did, indeed, buy the service to preserve the bookmarks (particularly the public bookmarks) then that is a good thing for the open Web.

The one issue is that those bookmarks probably go back a decade or so and a good number of those bookmarks will point to sites that have since gone offline. It will certainly be interesting to see whether there is some sort of back-up similar to the Wayback Machine or Pinboard’s site backup service (for paid subscribers)?

As an aside and speaking of links … perhaps you could fix your RSS feed for your blog, Mr Ceglowski? The announcement post isn’t showing up on the main blog page or in your blog’s RSS feed. I still use RSS so that sort of thing is helpful.

Image credit: Sanwal Deen

Categories
Business and work Social Web

Perhaps WhatsApp won't be merged with Facebook Messenger

Update (2014-02-20): Nathan makes a good point in the comments and I was also reminded of my post from about a year ago in which I considered the implications of just such an acquisition.

I was just reading the Facebook press release about its $16bn WhatsApp acquisition and noticed this quote by WhatsApp’s co-founder and CEO, Jan Koum:

WhatsApp’s extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide. We’re excited and honored to partner with Mark and Facebook as we continue to bring our product to more people around the world.

Notice the phrase “partner with Mark and Facebook”? I was wondering earlier whether Facebook would find a way to combine WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger but this suggests Facebook may approach this the same way it approached the Instagram acquisition – leave the service running relatively independently and integrate its frameworks (including its terms of service and privacy policy) into Facebook’s frameworks and processes.

Also, bringing 450 million people into Facebook’s broader community does’t hurt either and the $16bn price tag gives you a sense of the value WhatsApp’s 450 million users has to Facebook.