Delicious asked very little of its users. Save a link, slap a word or two on it, move on. But because those labels were public by default, a personal filing habit produced something collaborative: anyone who visited a tag’s page saw what the crowd had saved under that word, newest first, with nobody asking for permission or a profile. It was invented, as many useful things are, out of annoyance — Joshua Schachter built a spreadsheet and then a script to track links he kept for the Memepool community, and launched del.icio.us publicly in September 2003. The site gave “tag” its modern meaning on the web and made that word a small engine of discovery.
Tagging made bookmarks a shared instrument
The magic was that the system ran on people’s self-interest and exposed the residue. A programmer saving a page under “ruby” was doing chores for herself, but the tag view turned that errand into a recommendation to every stranger who looked. “Popular” and “recent” pages surfaced what a wide web of readers were collectively paying attention to, and following another user let you sail through one informed person’s collection as a browseable reading list. Bookmarks read as quiet endorsements, so the community was effectively a very large, very casual peer-review board. Before recommendation feeds existed, the crowd’s bookmarks were the recommendation feed. By the end of 2008 Delicious claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique saved URLs, and the service’s role as a discovery instrument looked settled.
What exporting could not carry away
Then ownership did the damage no feature could. Yahoo bought Delicious in December 2005 and mostly let it sit. In December 2010 a leaked Yahoo slide listed the service under “sunset”, and panicked users began exporting their collections and defecting, most visibly to the leaner Pinboard. Yahoo clarified it would sell rather than kill the site, and in April 2011 it was sold to AVOS, the new venture of YouTube’s founders. The relaunch that September shipped without core features, deleted the support forum, and replaced community discussion with an email address; “stacks”, a Pinterest-style grouping feature added later that year, was converted back into tags by August 2012. Science, Inc. took over in May 2014, Delicious Media in 2016, and in June 2017 Pinboard bought the shrinking thing for about $35,000 and made the site read-only effective June 15. Ceglowski said he bought it in part so it “wouldn’t disappear from the web“.
Users were still able to export their bookmarks — the export tool that a previous owner had disabled was switched back on days before the freeze. A dump of your own URLs is exactly what it sounds like, though. It did not preserve the network those bookmarks had been nodes in: the live tag pages, the “popular” list, the feeds of users you trusted, or the shared context of who saved what, under which words, with which notes. The public record of a community’s attention could not be zipped. The site survives as a read-only archive — del.icio.us now greets visitors as “a ghost, haunting the internet“, a museum of links past where you can still log in and recover your old data. The corpus remains; the collaboration does not. Users dispersed to Pinboard, Pocket, and newer services, and the dispersed part that never came along was the shared instrument that made bookmarking feel social.