UPDATE: I’ve created a spreadsheet where you can add information about the various services and requirements. Please add what you can.
Delicious, it appears, is going to be closed down. I am hugely sad about this – Delicious is possibly the most useful tool I use as a journalist, academic and writer. Not just because of the way it makes it possible for me to share, store and retrieve information very easily – but because of the network of other users doing just the same whose overlapping fields of information I can share.
I follow over 100 people in my Delicious network, and my biggest requirement of any service that I might switch to is that as many of those people move there too.
So I’d like to ask: if Delicious does shut down, where will you move to? Publish2? Pinboard.in? Diigo? Google Reader (sorry, not functional enough for me)? Or something else? (Here are some ideas) Please post your comments.
Online Journalism Blog 
I’m leaning to Publish2, but am interested in what others see as best option.
I’ve gone for Pinboard, mainly as it’s the only other I’ve heard of… so, I’m theorising that it might prove the most popular and the network and the number of people there is the most important thing.
pinboard.in – I’ve been uhming and ahing about it for a while. I like the idea of the premium archive feature as I like to take backups of web pages which I might need later (currently I use evernote for those backups).
I’m always worried by services that could just vanish but which become so integral to everything, so the “everyone pays a modest amount” approach at pinboard is a comfort.
I am importing all my delicious bookmarks to Diigo, just in case. But I’m also considering Xmarks. But definitly by best choice would be to stick with delicious…
Jon B, I know more people who use Publish2, so that’s my reason for leaning that way, but the archiving feature does appeal (Jon H). Open to other ideas…
Go with Pinboard. You can export bookmarks from RSS
Like this http://pinboard.in/u:djsoup/
Unlike Delicious, nobody knows you are there, but that adds exclusivity.
Judging by your delicious bookmarks I think that Diigo will serve you better in terms of networking & social.
I’m using both diigo and pinboard, but ultimately pinboard is the weapon of choice for me since i’m less into social and pinboard’s unofficial tag is “anti-social bookmarking”.
P.S. Altough it’s sad to see delicious go, I have to say that the latest “updates” and “features” were destroying its simplicity…
I moved to Diigo a few months ago, really loving all the features. Free account is enough to replace Delicious, paid account gets even more! (cached pages, screenshots, etc.)
I will hedge my bets with a couple of services. I’ve just signed up for pinboard and will do the same with Diigo. Delicious has been so useful for me. I will miss the network as I doubt all my contacts will end up on the same platform. A great loss.
It’s also sad to see the end of Alta Vista.
If this is true, then Yahoo! have revealed themselves to be complete idiots (and not for the first time). Yahoo! are essentially an old media company and, at least in the UK, its senior people were always recruited from old media. It’s aim is to generate banner ad hits and perhaps a few sponsorship deals. That its model. And of course delicious doesn’t fit when you look at products through the old media prism.
That said, Xmarks versus Delicious? Christ, I know which one I would miss the most.
I’m moving to Pinboard. The simplicity reminds me a lot of delicious when it got started. I have a diigo account, but the service really tries to do too much in my opinion.
I’ve had a few conversations with colleagues about this today – most favor either Pinboard or Diigo. The difference seems to be one of taste rather than features, outlined by Jeton and Charles Lacz comment above. Those who like Pinboard seem to like the simplicity and even austerity of it. Those who like Diigo like all of the features and the many options to be social.
I have been on Diigo for almost two years, and I use it daily. As a Ph.D. student I love the ability to highlight and annotate my links so I know what I was thinking when I saved it. As a teacher I use the group features to collect links specific to my class. Diigo has an excellent Chrome plug-in. You can save copies of pages, and there’s now a Read Later option.
So it really comes down to your personal bookmarking style, I think.
I’ve now created a spreadsheet where you can add information about features of the various competing services: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApTo6f5Yj1iJdHhxaFd0TVJWUUx2NWF5UkJUS0w3LXc&hl=en_GB&authkey=CNOXzPgH
I’m hoping delicious goes open source, failing that I will use both diigo and pinboard. I may go back to publish2, but since they did an overhaul of the service the Twitter funcionality has gone – plus the networks were nowhere near as useful as delicious.
One of the issues I have is I use delicious tags to create a news archive:
http://kigaliwire.com/news-archive/
And I’m not sure that will be possible with any other service. If anyone knows a way of mirroring tag rolls, clouds and lists using other bookmarking tools, please chime in.
Re: above comment. Looks like Diigo offers the tag cloud solution I need
http://www.diigo.com/tools/tagroll
Evernote and Diigo
Delicious was useful not just for the bookmarking, but other features too, namely:
* Being able to search its database without having to sign in
* RSS feeds off that search
Why? Because you can create dashboards off that, which show how engaged people are about a brand. So, if you search for, say, Microsoft, then you get a feed showing not just what people are saying about it, but what people considered important enough to bookmark about it. It’s another level of engagement – actually taking an action based on content.
As far as I can tell, none of the alternatives offer this. If someone could recommend one – a viable alternative that supports persistent searches with RSS – then I’d *really love* to know about it.
Isn’t part of the beauty of standards that we can move our bookmarks wherever we please? I don’t think we need worry too much about where our friends are because we’ll probably eventually gravitating to them, or continue to form networks on more than one platform.
How about Google Bookmarks. Somehow supports tags – which are important – folders are no option!
Any experiences?
How does it relate to Google Reader Likes/ Notes? Anyone?
There is of course the problem of not being able to export other people’s bookmarks.
(And apologies for my bad grammar earlier.)
So sad to hear about Delicious. I’m still trying to determine my post Delicious destination. I’m considering Pinboard. I do like Delicious’ social component. It’s nice to see what other people are bookmarking and what news they are reading. I like Publish2, but that leaves out my non-journalism folks.
Thanks Paul for working on the spreadsheet. I’ll review that too before I make my decision.
Won’t the escalating cost of Pinboard eventually put people off? It’s reached over £5 now, and if people flood to it (as they seem to be doing) it could rise a lot higher unless they change the pricing strategy.
Diigo, on the other hand, is free. Therefore it’s more likely that my friends will go there.
I’ll be using them both for now.
think I’m plumping for diigo..i’m an educator and am not sure of the pros and cons of getting one of their educational accounts..any thoughts?
The best post I’ve read on this subject (other than this one, of course 🙂 ) is http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-services-long-live-web-services/“>Death to web services. Long live web services!
Executive summary: “What if we hosted our own data, and provided APIs for all these webapps so that they can use our data?”
I’m all over the place with deciding what to switch to.
Pinboard’s simplicity appeals, as does ‘antisocial’ bookmarking, but the fee is a turn off.
Trying Licorize – Uncertain; though it led me to look into Evernote – again, the fee/pay service is a turn off, and not sure if I want the GTD format as opposed to just my bookmarks.
Briefly tried Linkable – so buggy in start up I’ve already ditched it.
Looking at Diigo now…
will use my own installation of delicious clone scuttle http://sf.net/projects/scuttle/
Packrati.us has some useful info on security issues with alternatives to delicio.us
It looks like Delicious isn’t shutting immediately – http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2010/12/whats-next-for-delicious.html
Which means there’s no need to panic yet. I’m starting to look for an alternative, but one thing I’ve learnt about online apps is that if something is good — and Delicious IS good — the vacuum doesn’t last for long.
heard that Delicious may in fact be staying around as they are planning on jumping ship rather than close down
Thanks – very much sounds from that like they’ll be sold off. Hope they find a decent home.
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Notwithstanding my reservations about cloud computing (above), I’m thinking about embarking on Tumblr as a kind of bookmarky, networky thing. Is that bonkers?
@Freelance Unbound. I would say so.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-unreliable-blogging-services-2/
Interestingly I’ve never actually used bookmarking sites up until now. I never had much use for them, but the more I blog, write and think about the mechanics of journalism the more I can see their use.
Weirdly, the publicity Delicious got when it was announced that Yahoo let it go actually prompted me to sign up to a bookmarking site, namely Diigo. I’ve heard good things about Pinboard but seeing as this is my first foray into the world of bookmarking I thought a free service would be good to start with.
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Been using delicious religiously for years, got my browser set up to add links and comments swiftly and efficiently, got a good network of contacts, so hoping they do find a more willing host, as with some development they could continue to lead the way…
but in the meantime have exported all my bookmarks into Evernote and diigo which has a similar toolset, to keep the trail running.
Would be willing to pay s amll subscription to keep a high quality tool running, and will be watching to see how it all pans out…
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