Tag: delicious

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
Applications Useful stuff

Bookmarking into the void

I was reading a post titled “I’ve Been Using Evernote All Wrong. Here’s Why It’s Actually Amazing” and a comment the article’s author made about the Web Clipper got me thinking about bookmarks:

Because I saved each article with the Web Clipper, I have the entire text of the article and the source link right there, plus any highlights and notes I’ve made in each. This is light years better for me than just pasting the links to each article, or trying to write everything down myself into one giant note. Plus, by creating an entire notebook, each note functions as an item in a to-do list, which makes finishing the project much easier.

This tip isn’t exactly news to anyone familiar with Evernote but it reminded me that although I bookmark stuff fairly frequently in Pinboard, I don’t remember the last time I went back to Pinboard to find something I had bookmarked. It is pretty much a one way flow of information and that isn’t an indictment on Pinboard, it is a commentary on what I think I use Pinboard for and what I actually use it for. It could just as well be Delicious.

I have over 8 000 bookmarks in Pinboard which I have accumulated over the years. A substantial number of them come from Delicious when I used it as my primary bookmarking service and I have several workflows set up in IFTTT to automatically add more links to Pinboard. All that stuff works brilliantly except I have probably gone back to Pinboard to find things 2 or 3 times in the last year.

I capture stuff I want to read later into Instapaper (sometimes Pocket) so I don’t need the “read later” feature in Pinboard. I use the Evernote Web Clipper frequently to capture stuff I find (although the experience of reading in Evernote isn’t even close to Instapaper or Pocket so Evernote is mostly a reference system for me with working notes coming a close second).

On the other hand, I look for stuff in Evernote several times a day so I started thinking I should just use Evernote to bookmark stuff, in addition to capturing just about anything I may want to refer back to later. It is interesting that bookmarking services are going beyond just capturing links and tagging them. Pinboard and read-it-later service, Pocket, both offer premium users an option to capture the content of pages they bookmark and to archive that content for future reference down the line.

It sounds like a good idea, in theory, but I wonder how manageable it will be. The key thing is to be able to import those 8 000+ bookmarks into a specific notebook and not have them run through my Evernote Inbox for later processing because that will never happen! I also have this nagging feeling that adding all these bookmarks would just add way too much clutter to my Evernote notebooks, especially if the import doesn’t include tags and notes from the source Pinboard bookmarks.

I just imported all my bookmarks into Google Bookmarks for good measure, while I decide what to do. As if I’d do nothing in the meantime.

Of course another option is to just use Pinboard more often …