In 2004 the concept of organising and sharing links on the Web was fresh and new, and Delicious was really the first to offer an innovative solution to save, organise and share bookmarks with friends. Delicious popularised the use of bookmarklets and practically coined the term 'social bookmarking'. It was probably the first Web 2.0 service to make a domain hack cool and not cheap looking (it was http://del.icio.us/ until 2008, and actually called itself del.icio.us initially).
More interestingly, Delicious popularised tagging and – probably more than any other service at that time – launched an avenue of functionality known as 'social tagging'. In the deluge of social tagging research papers that have been published since Delicious was launched, few will not have cited Delicious within its introduction. And, of course, social tagging - or social bookmarking, or collaborative tagging - has come to be one of the defining aspects of Web 2.0. Social tagging has sent shock waves throughout the Web, influencing the design of subsequent social media services and discovery tools, such as digital libraries. Even the ubiquitous (and infamous) tag cloud - which sister service Flickr invented - was adopted by Delicious and rendered infinitely more useful with the uniquely identifiable resources it and its users curated.
And all of the aforementioned was why Yahoo! decided to acquire Delicious in late 2005 for circa $30 million, in what commentators noted as the first attempt by a Web 1.0 company to jump on to the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Of course, since 2005 many of the original Web 2.0 names have found a Web 1.0 home in which to evolve (e.g. Delicious and Flickr @ Yahoo!; YouTube, Picasa, Blogger @ Google; MySpace @ News Corp; etc.). To be sure, Yahoo! paid too much for Delicious; but Yahoo! weren't buying the technology (which at the time of purchase wasn't particularly complex). They were buying the brand, its users and the Web 2.0 kudos. However, Yahoo! failed to capitalise on all of that, and even failed to harness the underlying technology to make Delicious a household name. One would have thought that an injection of Yahoo! R&D would have made Delicious the most innovative social bookmaking service available, with plenty of horizontal integration with other Yahoo! products. Far from innovating, Delicious has been static since its acquisition. Five years on there are numerous social bookmarking services, virtually all of which are more innovative, more exciting and ultimately more useful.
It is an end of an era to be sure. No-one talks about 'Web 2.0' any more because there is no Web 2.0 to point to, and the demise of Delicious is an example of this. Web 2.0 is now about a handful of social media behemoths. To some extent the 'sunsetting' of Delicious is a comment on the utility of tagging and the value that can be mined from tags, and, ergo, the money that can be made from them. Tightening the use of tags is something which has attracted more attention recently from the CommonTag initiative and rival social bookmarking services such as Faviki and ZigTag. TechCrunch suggest that Yahoo! could have made money from Delicious if they had wanted to and that organisational issues prevented Delicious from being profitable. Perhaps they are right. Only a small team would have been required - but it can't have been easy to make money otherwise Yahoo! would have done it. The moment for Delicious is now gone... And this is an obituary of sorts: can you see any company thinking Delicious is a good investment?
