#deliciousfail

Link sharing site Delicious re-launched on Monday with unwanted changes, huge technical problems, and a lesson in how to kill a beloved product.

The re-launch of social link sharing site Delicious, now under the stewardship of YouTube founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley under their AVOS startup banner, is nothing short of a complete, mind-boggling disaster.

How AVOS took a beloved social sharing site and ruined it from stem to stem, and up to this minute have a complete, angry user PR explosion on their hands, is as enlightening as it is hard to watch.

What hasn’t been discussed was Why the youtube founders made such a obvious mistake?

After reading through this nytimes interview and the “second act” one, I realized that they are not delicious users. They don’t use delicious. Quote from the NYTImes post:

"Both founders acknowledge that they were never diehard Delicious users. “I signed up in 2005 and I didn’t use it again until 2011,” Mr. Chen said with an embarrassed laugh."

So they bought delicious to build another digg, reddit, hacker news or stumbleupon, but not a better delicious. It’s like lady gaga bought the Library of Congress, wanting to make it “mainstream”.

I, like many of you, knew it was coming. I just thought I would have more time. Yes, I am talking about the makeover the new owners have given Delicious.com. Rather than put up a beta-site for people to test and give feedback first (Yahoo, for all you do wrong, I appreciate this about you so much), this morning I woke up to the new version of the site. My immediate reaction was horror and confusion, but that is my reaction to any massive change so I decided to wait a few hours and poke at it to see what I actually thought rather than write a post consisting of more exclamation points than letters. I've played with the new site and watched the reactions unfold on LJ, DW and Twitter for the past few hours so I now feel qualified to give some opinions on the changes. Now I just have to organize my four pages of scribbled notes.

It does seem pretty clear that the transition process didn’t go very smoothly, and that’s clearly irritated quite a few people. The comments in this article are just a small sampling of what’s out there. That doesn’t mean that people won’t like the new Delicious. Whether or not it can capture mainstream appeal reamins to be seen, and again, I think mobile apps could help with that. After using it for a day, I don’t think it’s perfect, but I expect they’ll continue to make improvements. I do think it has the foundation of something that could grow into a really interesting place to find content shared by yourself and others.

When the social bookmarking service Delicious relaunched, people were concerned that it looked different. But now a litany of serious complaints is emerging: broken services, missing pages, deleted accounts. Were these mistakes deliberate -- or just the result of bad planning?

1. AVOS didn’t understand how people were using the website
2. AVOS didn’t get how people were using the API
3. AVOS didn’t understand they were playing with a live product

Sold by Yahoo to the founders of YouTube, social bookmarking service Delicious is one of the great survivors of Web 2.0. But can a revamp convince new users to bookmark the web -- and keep the old ones happy at the same time?

What I didn’t expect was a high volume of comments pointing out that this was just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the response in this comment thread was unanimous: This relaunch appears to be broken.

As a co-founder of trunk.ly and a direct competitor to delicious, I think this new version is one step forward, two steps back.

As the majority of fans have already noticed, AVOS, the new owners of delicious, launched the new version of the site today. Fans have also been quick to point out that the new site has lost a substantial amount of functionality, including some features particularly heavily used by fans, such as tags with a / in them, tag subscriptions, and networks. The new site is also incompatible with the scripts used by many fannish newsletter compilers. Since today was the site launch, we're hopeful that many of these issues will soon be fixed (we're certainly familiar with the idea of making lots of rapid changes after new code is released!). However, in the wake of all this, many fans are looking for a new fannish bookmarking service. Right now, the Archive of Our Own doesn't have enough features to provide a delicious replacement, but we wanted to let you know what we do have and what we have planned for the future.

I’ve had a chance to have a bit of a poke around the new site and there’s a few things I’ve noticed that have basically erased all the things I actually use delicious for.
Firstly, I now can’t see my tags down the side of my bookmarks (now links) page other than those used on the page, which is how I navigate my bookmarks - I now can’t browse them without knowing what specifically I’m looking for, and neither can anybody else. It would be much easier to have all tags - and their bundles! - available on my user page for navigation. I use my delicious as a recs list, so this is really important.

After I ruminated on why Diigo is probably not a good haven for fannish bookmarks, [personal profile] lian linked to this report. Apparently, Diigo has an algorithm in place that automatically turns private any bookmarks that contain 'inappropriate' words like 'sex' or 'sexy'.

This was news to me. I have no idea when this algorithm was implemented; it seems to be another one of those magic rule/feature changes that Diigo sometimes trots out without warning. I went to have a closer look at my Diigo bookmarks, and indeed, every bookmark with 'sex' in the title has been turned private. I never received any sort of notification or explanation about this.

all of you who are moving to Diigo should be aware that in addition to banning a number of fandom accounts including mine as being "spam" (they haven't sent a response to my inquiry about why they did this), apparently they also havean algorithm to detect whether links contain "porn," whereupon the links are automatically made private.

So it looks like as a social alternative to Delicious, even though it's free, Diigo is right out.

Apparently the new delicious is not very useful in very many ways, and people are migrating. Many seem to be mentioning Pinboard and Diigo. I've never used Pinboard, but I have used Diigo intensively since 2007. It's a shiny service with a lot of very useful functionality, so much of it that I'm still not sure I can bear to leave it behind completely. (EDIT: Now I'm sure.)

It's not a good port in a storm for fannish bookmarks, though. I'm sure of that much. Of course all bookmarking services have their problems, and I don't mean to blow Diigo's out of proportion - again, the things you can do with bookmarks on that service are pretty amazing, and I'm still half in love with it myself.

But I don't trust Diigo anymore. They have a history of making functions quietly disappear without notifying users or explaining anything (like the full text group search feature which our department's research group happened to rely on, and the auto-post to many other bookmarking services feature that Diigo prided itself on at first and then retired almost completely). My bookmarks export broke down somewhere in 2009. All my requests for help on the support group, where the admins are usually very active, have gone ignored by Diigo staff in spite of other users reporting the same problem and helping me bump the threads.