Yahoo! To Close Delicious 311
Thwomp writes "A leaked internal presentation from Yahoo shows that Delicious, the popular bookmark sharing site, will be wound down. According to Daring Fireball's John Gruber the whole team was let go just yesterday. It appears that Delicious is just one of the services in Yahoo's portfolio that is going the way of the Dodo."
They are also kiling Altavista (Score:5, Interesting)
From looking at the leaked slide, they are getting rid of Altavista which has more meaning for me. Delicious as just another Web 2.0 company, but Altavista was an early pioneer on the web and could have easily been what Google is now.
Exactly when Yahoo management became yahoos (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO that's when they stuck some hollywood exec (Semel) in who knew nothing about the internet in 2001.
ISTM he was so enamored by AOL buying Time Warner he changed Yahoo from being the epitome fo the internet into a AOL-wanabe-clone.
This is the guy who turned down the chance to buy Google for one billion dollars; and then again for 3 billion; and the same guy who shared Yahoo confidential info with China's government.
Yahoo's Geocities could have been Facebook+MySpace.
Yahoo Mail could have been gmail.
Yahoo's Delicious could have been stumbleupon+twitter+digg.
Yahoo's Overture could have been Google Adsense+Adwords
Yahoo's Altavista could have been google search.
But instead Yahoo's turning into little more than a reseller of Bing search results.
Yahoo has TWO things that don't suck... (Score:5, Interesting)
... Delicious and Flickr. They just killed Delicious, and I'm hoping Flickr isn't so far behind.
I used to use Yahoo Mail, which was a great webmail service for its time... in 2000. I also used Yahoo Auctions until that folded. Before Google, I relied on the human-assisted Yahoo Directory for my web searches. I liked Yahoo Games, when they didn't have much besides pool and scrabble and word games.
But all of Yahoo's services have turned into ad-laden, bloated interfaces with out-of-date technology. It seems that the company has been unable/unwilling to innovate and has just been milking their previously respected brand for ad revenue. Flickr and Delicious were the only two services that seemed to resist this trend :-/.
I guess it's time to export my Delicious bookmarks and find an alternative host for them :(. SimPy and Del.irio.us used to be a couple of pretty nice open-source clones, but seem to have disappeared. Anybody else have a recommendation for a site with similar functionality, clean interface, and good browser addon support?
Re:Exactly when Yahoo management became yahoos (Score:5, Interesting)
actually Geocities was originally a network. A long time ago all the sites were set up in neighbourhoods. With numbers similar to house numbers. I was actually a community leader in the late 90s and we'd help with taking care of various neighbourhoods. Later they got rid of the hierarchy and made it all flat.
Google's not all that (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Google's searches really turn up a lot of trash for me most of the time. Google ranks pages by how much they're referenced from one another, and what that does is uses the average level of attention and interest of the crowd - but the crowd these days is the usual Gaussian, not at all the original crowd of technical people, and consequently -- Google's search results reflect that.
One thing Yahoo *really* did better was class types of sites and put them together into a sensible tree; if I was looking for a particular type of software, finding a really good selection of it - if one existed - was easy. On Google, it's refine, refine, refine because the search results are *loaded* with spam, link-farms, and just generally junk.
I run a few websites, some of which are quite popular, and a trend right now is people buying one line text ads - paying fairly dearly for them, too - so that Google will see that one of my popular sites references some other site, and so ups their search ranking. The link of course is nothing but financially driven, and really has no reflection at all on the value of the linked site... but that's how Google rolls. The end result is the sites with the money climb in the rankings.
On the original Yahoo index, if you offered, say, a C compiler, you were in the list with the other people who offered a C compiler. Alphabetically. Wasn't about who bought what. That was *great*. Then Yahoo got slow. Not so great. THEN Yahoo decided you had to pay to be listed. And that was the end of Yahoo's useful tech, just that quickly. Poof!
But Google hasn't replaced that original Yahoo functionality with something better. Google is fast, easy and mediocre. Which is, I suppose, where things generally tend to end up anyway. But I still miss the original Yahoo index, before they utterly screwed it up with pay-for-your-listing-or-wait-forever.