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."
More info beyond Daring Fireball snippet (Score:5, Informative)
With Yahoo shutting down Del.icio.us [del.icio.us], where will we bookmark things such as these delicious Christmas Lights [komar.org]
Re:More info beyond Daring Fireball snippet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More info beyond Daring Fireball snippet (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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.
Yahasbeen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yahoo is a has-been. It was at its most useful when it was a maintained tree of useful sites, essentially spam free. Then they got slow about updating it. THEN they decided you should pay or they'd drag their heels and probably not even "get to" your submission. Then (surprise) no one wanted to play with them anymore, and they shut the whole thing down. That's the history of Yahoo's actual tech. Today, they are useful to me only because they bought Flickr. I appreciate the service, but I don't think of it as "Yahoo's tech."
Car analogy:
It's like the difference between a fellow who buys a car, and one who has built one of equal quality. They both end up with cars, so if you're simply looking for a ride, they're equal. But the guy who built his car deserves a lot more respect than the guy who bought one.
Yahoo built a car, fouled the paint job, ran it into a few immovable objects, junked it, and bought another. I respect the original build, and sincerely regret that they screwed it up. That they bought another, I don't find particularly notable. I do like to ride in it, though.
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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?
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Probably true... Web 2.0 gave rise to Bubble 2.0, which soon enough will give rise to Crash 2.0, I am afraid.
Yahoo! and Delicious (Score:2)
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.
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The real tragedy here is the destruction of the community. Altavista has no more value to me, but with delicious I know I can bounce over and check out what my friend Bob bookmarked about Ruby in 2006 or look at the history of annotations to a URL. That data will become inaccessible to me & I'll likely loose contact with some people I only follow through delicious.
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Welcome to the new, improved, consolidated Internet. Prepare for a lot more communities to die if we don't get Net Neutrality.
And yes, this does have something to do with Net Neutrality.
Re:Net Neutrality (Score:3)
Not sure quite where you're headed with that note.
This seemed to me to be more about "corporate boredom" aka ROI calculations. Put another way, it's like the blockbuster mentality of movies.
I liked the Long Tail mood of the net for a long time. Get an idea, and sure enough, a 40 person forum already existed for it.
Now these megacorps are closing down iconic net stuff, *instead of giving someone else a chance to spin it off*.
Re:They are also kiling Altavista (Score:4, Informative)
Are you kidding? Yes AV was the first major search engine but you seem to forget or be ignorant of how it sold search positions AND how it bragged to the IT media how AV was farsighted, how that approach was the way forward, and only a fool could think otherwise. That and untargeted display advertisement was their doom. Now you say that's 20/20 hindsight thinking, but, here on /. concurrently it was discussed and highlighted how their approach was completely wrong and how time would prove it so. And it came to pass, and not too long afterward the ascendancy among geeks of alternative engines was apparent. I have no love lost nor nostalgia for them, their results sucked hard at the time, we were all fed up with their bad quality never mind the paid results.
Their domain was disconnected for years and sold repeatedly at base prices. They tried to come back as an mp3 engine for a while but then the mafiaa got into the ass kicking game.
Re:They are also kiling Altavista (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps being passed around from Digital Equipment to Compaq to HP had something to do with it not being successful.
But in mid/late 90's it was the best search engine by far.
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It was... but then Google had the idea to not actually trust what web pages said about their own content. I really don't miss the large set of search exclusions I had to use back in those days to avoid links designed to game the search engines.
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.
Re:They are also kiling Altavista (Score:5, Insightful)
I think he meant 'easy' as in were in the best market position to be able to do so, as they were once one of the (if not the?) most popular search engines on the Web --- a position in which, by definition, you have it theoretically easier than *anyone else*, i.e. it would've been easier for them to be the next Google than Google. But the Google guys worked both smarter and harder. In that context, "easy" is indeed the best term and I understood it perfectly clearly.
the whole team was let go just yesterd (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Daring Fireball's John Gruber the whole team was let go just yesterday.
Merry Xmas from Yahoo.
Please don't worry (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the whole team was let go just yesterday (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you think of a better time to do it? That's some bonus checks that didn't get inked. The savings probably went straight to the CEO's belly.
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So a company should keep loss-making people on longer just because it's Christmas? Sure it's a cold thing to have to do, but spending extra tens of millions of dollars just to be nice in difficult economic times is something I doubt just about any one of us would do either in the same position.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Please, if you are going to close a money-losing operation, you can do it in november. Why keep it going just another couple of weeks?
Now, if another couple of weeks makes no difference, then close it down after Xmas
Re:the whole team was let go just yesterd (Score:5, Insightful)
This practice of letting people go right before Christmas is just despicable. Besides the obvious human cost, it also reflects VERY poorly on their company. Having worked for a company that did the same thing in the past, I know morale will be very low.
not surprised (Score:2)
As far as social bookmarking sites go I think StumbleUpon was a clear favorite, though Digg and Reddit seemed to be very similar to how Delicious was setup, I wonder who will "win" in the end...actually, I really don't care.
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Digg is collapsing.
Wrong tense (Score:2)
Digg is collapsing.
I think when the redesign came out, it was clear Digg was already dead.
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Stumbleupon is a good one but Delicious seemed to have more variety in certain tags (eg. anime) and really if you used http://delicious.com/tag/nameoftag?random=1 [delicious.com] you'd get a decent channel surfing bookmark right there. Every time you visit that bookmark, it'd redirect to a random page from that (nameoftag replaced w/ tag) tag. Well I guess I'd better start thumbing the hell out of what is worth stumbling before it's all gone.
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They're not quite the same, though. Delicious has always been at least in part about personal use: Sure, it would be cool if someone else saw this neat site I bookmarked and also liked it, but really I'm posting it so that I can find it myself later, since I might not be on the same computer.
Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon, however, are very much about promotion^H^H^H^H^Hsharing, and if you post things just for your own use, they'll get treated as junk or spam.
Re:not surprised (Score:4)
I didn't think of Digg nor Reddit really in the same was as I looked at Delicious. Delicious was where I'd shove articles and the like which I found interesting, but wouldn't revisit often enough to warrant space on my browser's bookmark bar.
Digg and Reddit were places for 'news' and such. You'd put things you'd suspect others would like, as opposed to say, bookmarking the javadoc to a plugin API, or a deal on a particular gadget you've been looking at. I didn't think of those two as a bookmarking service.
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I'm confused by your statement. I don't see a way in which Delicious is anything like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit? Those sites are link-spam sites with comment threads attached to them. Delicious was a database of your bookmarks, online that you could categorize, tag, and utilize just like a bookmark (most browsers have an extension to allow it to replace your actual bookmarks). You could also view other people's bookmarks and view the current most popular (or simply most recent) bookmarks of the entire
now.. (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll second that. Take them and their douche of the year too! Say, if Yahoo is laying off so many people, why are they trying to hire contractors and such? I keep getting calls about doing admin work for them, but I'm not the type of rat that jumps onto a sinking ship...
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Say, if Yahoo is laying off so many people, why are they trying to hire contractors and such?
Because of uncertainty [foxnews.com] about the future:
This is the first entirely "temporary help service" job recovery. Our current "recovery" might be in its seventeenth month, but the few new private sector jobs have come from companies temporarily hiring staff on a contract basis. What were once jobs reserved for people hired to cover seasonal demand or permanent employees on sick leave have become the standard employment for many workers. Companies simply don't want the risk of hiring workers that they might soon have to get rid of. Since the recovery started in June 2009, the total number of private sector jobs has increased by 203,000. But these weren't "regular," permanent jobs. Indeed, permanent private sector jobs fell by 257,000.
The explanation behind temporary job creation is pretty simple: uncertainty.
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[ I like ]
Re:now.. (Score:5, Funny)
I hope Yahoo will buy Yahoo.
man (Score:5, Funny)
Re:man (Score:5, Funny)
That's what she said.
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There, fixed that for u.
What is it? (Score:2)
I hadn't heard of it anyway - it looks like just a collection of random links people post; kinda like slashdot except without the banal comments. WTF? Guess I'll make a clone and sell it to Google next year, muahahaha!
Re:What is it? (Score:5, Informative)
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del.icio.us is one of the best research tools on the Internet, -- especially for keeping abreast of innovations in the programming world.
It works like this:
You're working on text processing in Python, or something. So you search delicious for "python" and "textprocessing."
You go through the results, most of which are fairly generic.
But when you find something interesting -- you don't stop there: You ask, "Who was this person who thought this was interesting?"
Then you look at *that person's* tags under "Py
Sad (Score:3)
I like delicious and the FF toolbar to manage all of my bookmarks. Can we have some replacement suggestions?
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Personally I use Google Bookmarks. Fairly, simple but enough for my needs. Furthermore I like to have them associated with my google account. I manage them with "Yet Another Google Bookmarks Extension" for Chromium.
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To make things worse, I use three browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and Safari) so a browser specific bookmarking tool won't do it. Any other suggestions?
At the risk of repeating myself: Xmarks. It'll sync Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE.
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True. I expected good Chrome extensions for Google services, made by Google. But that is not the case at all which is surprising. Even their GMail checker is pretty bad, doesn't even support multiple accounts (so I use Simple Gmail Checker instead).
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Chrome has its own bookmark sync now (separate from Google Bookmarks, IIRC) that does what you want. Open up Options, then go to the Personal Stuff tab.
If you need to sync across multiple browsers, Xmarks [xmarks.com] will sync Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari.
XMarks & Browser-Specific Services (Score:2)
I use XMarks [xmarks.com] to synchronize across different computers and browsers. They were actually going to shut down next month, but an outpouring of support from users convinced LastPass it would be worth buying the company and setting up a freemium model (basic service is free, you can pay for extras). Free accounts get automatic bookmark sync and online access to the bookmarks from other browsers. Premium accounts add Android & iPhone apps, tab sync, and a couple of other things.
Most web browsers have some so
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I like delicious and the FF toolbar to manage all of my bookmarks. Can we have some replacement suggestions?
Use Chrome? Sync is built-in, and will only improve as google continues to develop for ChromeOS.
-Taylor
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Xmarks for bookmark management, and StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com] for site discovery. SU stores favorited items into a bookmarks folder (in addition to the SU profile), and Xmarks does synchronization.
Both have excellent cross-browser/cross-platform plugins.
Warning: the Stumble button can be habit forming.
Part of the 600 (Score:2)
Some of the 600 cut from Yahoo, I guess. Not too surprises how many bookmarking/aggregating sites do you need?
Best of luck to them, tough economy out there.
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Just one, and it's been del.icio.us for around 5 years or so.
Going the way of the Dodo... (Score:4, Funny)
Are they that broke? (Score:3)
Yahoo must have decided the bad publicity of making people redundant right before Christmas was still less than the cost of keeping them on the payroll for one more month.
Low, Yahoo!
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Dec. 31st is the end of the quarter.
Current mood: stage 1 denial (Score:2)
Why? :-(
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Yahoo may leave us in out in the cold soon (Score:3)
It is beginning to be a problem that Yahoo is dying slowly. First, they started compressing pictures that used to be fullsized in their popular "Groups" 10 years ago. Then, they started removing Briefcases. Last year, I had to review my Geocities files for anything important before they removed it. This year, their Hotjobs service got merged with Monster.com, so I'll lose my account there too.
I use Yahoo mail to get around the all-too-popular mailbox purge that the more "hip" webmails use. That is to avoid being forced into a paywall when I stop checking mail. Seeing that they are downsizing and the frequency of their cuts is increasing, I'm have to move all 12 years' worth of my mail and profile data elsewhere before it dies. I don't want it to be warningless like when WHQuestion closed down and everyone migrated to KnowPost but lost all their pictures, answers and intersting conversations with other great minds. I don't want my posts and attachments here to go the same way. Sadly, two more years like that and Yahoo will surely be dead, like Altavista. Funny thing is, I just found out Yahoo owns them now. Acquisitions don't always mean the old clients stay with the new boss, which might be Google or something, and my data will be open for a greater evil then.
Now that I think about my knowledge of Facebook, wiping Yahoo data now won't help keep it safe; "delete" doesn't exist when there's money to be made off of my time.
Worst Decision by Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously I am horrified and disappointed if this decision is for real. I have over 300 bookmarks stored in Delicious, and Delicious has been an extremely useful search engine for me. Because the search is based on social tagging that has gone through by human mind, Delicious is far more powerful than even Google for generic terms search, especially for single term queries that are too generic to return any useful results from other search engines. I don't know why such a useful site has become so less popular, but I believe it is just largely due to the lack of marketing and ignorance by Yahoo since the acquisition.
So far I don't know any other social bookmarking site that is better than Delicious. Perhaps I should start searching [delicious.com], but if anyone here in Slashdot knows one, please do tell me.
Anyway for those who are desperate like me to backup their Delicious bookmarks, here is the export link [delicious.com].
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Re:Worst Decision by Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because Yahoo! ran them into the ground. That's what Yahoo! does. They buy things (they don't innovate) and ruin them. They're like a smaller, hipper Microsoft.
I use Flickr, Delicious, and probably a few other things that are Yahoo brands. They've actively meddled with Flickr making the UI worse with each revision. Instead of focusing on reliability and core features, they've added a bunch of asinine bling. With Delicious they've merely left it alone to rot for the most part. Actually I'm fairly surprised that they're shutting Delicious down because they just pushed a UI update in the past month or so. I rather liked Delicious because it let me synchronize my bookmarks across different browsers and because it let me categorize my bookmarks easily.
As far as I'm concerned, this is further proof that Carol Bartz is a first class asshole who knows shit for all about running a business. Sure, the stockholders were pissed when Jerry Yang refused to sell out to Microsoft but at least Yang had decent reasons (preserving the brand identity and corporate culture) for doing what he did. Bartz is just another short-term profits first type CEO. Like Fiorina, Hurd, and Nardelli, Bartz thinks her slash and burn style is a one-size fits all type thing when in fact it's a one-size fits none.
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Actually useful (for you) does not imply actually profitable (for Yahoo!)
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I have been using delicious for a very long time. I have almost a thousand bookmarks collected over the past 5 years. I use it to tag things that I find interesting and will want to reference later, as a search engine to explore tags and find relevant sites when I'm getting interested in a new subject, and to be able to reference bookmarks from work or any other computer I find myself at. I have not seen much spam at all; the only time I ran into links that were obviously spammy was when checking out porn
From Daring whatever (Score:2)
Quote From Daring Firewhatnot:
"It’s almost hard to remember now, but just a few short years ago, Yahoo was the place for hot startups to find a home."
You mean Yahoo was the company with money to burn buying into hokey startups (exception for Delicious and a *few* others I'm sure).
Success (Score:2)
Nothing says success like jettisoning every non-essential part of your portfolio and abandoning your greatest assets -- staff -- a week before Christmas.
Crap. (Score:2)
I have been using del.icio.us for years - I actually have a fair amount of stuff in it.
Guess I will have to figure out how to reclaim that. I added a couple of sites just this week.
Too bad, all of the "cool" stuff just gets left for dead by these companies. If yahoo fucks with Flickr, we will have to have words, I use that thing all the time.
He who laughs last... (Score:2)
I didn't want to use del.icio.us, because by the time I started using social bookmarking, it was already owned by Yahoo!, and I specifically wanted something that might have been independent.
So I started using ma.gnolia. Awesome, fast service with nice little features and general Web 2.0-friendliness all around. They just failed to make working backups. Boom.
So I started using Twine. Leet folksonomic RDF-what-the-fuckery. Slowish. Yawn. Never quite figured out if it was possible to import bookmarks there. A
Got an actual source? (Score:2)
Do we have any actual sources other than a random blogger, a random tweet from a random twit, and a friend of a friend?
Re:Got an actual source? (Score:5, Informative)
That's almost first hand info, Dude.
Cloud-based services -- put your trust in the air! (Score:5, Informative)
If this is not a tailor-made argument for not trusting cloud-based services, I don't know what is. I don't care how "do no evil" your corporation-of-choice is; you're in their playground. They make the rules and break the rules at their whim (or the government's whim).
Export your bookmarks while you still can: curl --user petsounds:sebad0h -o delicious_bookmarks.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'
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You don't even have to ascribe evil intent here. All companies eventually die (except for banks that are "too big to fail", that is). Why trust your computing resources to an entity that might last as long as you?
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It makes a bit of a difference whether you actually pay for a cloud based service or not. If something is free, you can't really complain when it goes away. Gift horse, mouth, etc.
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The idea that any cloud-based service is free is a bit of a misnomer I think. Any time you post data to one, you trade the use of the service for insight and/or facts about your life.
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<!--
fe07.api.del.ac4.yahoo.net uncompressed/chunked Fri Dec 17 01:28:29 UTC 2010
-->
Aawww....
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Yup, paste fail. Sadly slashdot still doesn't allow post-submission editing.
misread the headline (Score:2)
Why not look it up? (Score:2)
Just look it up the delicious tag and you get 269086 Bookmarks [delicious.com]!
suicide.lo (Score:2)
Selling an option here? (Score:2)
sorry to break the news, but (Score:2)
Stallman was right: Careless computing (Score:4, Insightful)
Yahoo Video Also Closing (Score:5, Informative)
Got this notice in my Yahoo email inbox on Dec. 15:
Dear Yahoo! Video user,
After careful consideration, we will be removing all general user-generated content upload capability and user-uploaded video from Yahoo! Video. As a result, your videos, user profiles, ratings, favorites, and playlists will no longer be available after March 14, 2011. User video content from Yahoo! Video that remains embedded on third party sites will no longer be playable after March 14, 2011.
Available on your profile page is a software utility that will allow you to download the videos you have uploaded to Yahoo! Video to your computer through March 14, 2011. You can find your profile by clicking on the 'My Video' tab or going to http://video.yahoo.com/mypage [yahoo.com].
Once you download your videos, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video [flickr.com].
Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Yahoo! Video.
If you have any questions about this change, please visit our FAQ section, or contact Customer Care.
The Yahoo! Video Team
Re:What am I supposed to do now? (Score:5, Informative)
You can export your bookmarks here: https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export [delicious.com]
It's a standard Netscape bookmark file, so I expect other services to be able to import from it. But I haven't researched it yet.
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And I do not know of an equivalent service, period.
I suppose the reason they might [are] dropping Deli is the lack of money coming in, as I don't know where that income would come from.
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The main issue is synchronizing bookmarks across browsers rather than just copying them. While you could copy bookmarks.html between computers, it's a bit of a clumsy way of doing it, and results hoping that you don't obliterate bookmarks between copies. Of course, if you have a metric ton of bookmarks, you probably want to offload them to some other resource.
There's also keeping track of metadata such as visit count, last time visited, or some other things. Specifically, the upgrade from Firefox 2 to Fi
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happened to me once. sucked at the time but I'd rather have them do it to me a week before new year's than the week after. 14 months later I was glad I didn't have to worry about their w-2 for the IRS - for me it was a small company that would have forgot and I'd have had a bad time trying to get the the w-2 if they were even around.
This may be different since they get a severance package - not sure if it's a lump sum now or extends to next year but would be better for both parties if it's over this year.
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The same thing happened to my M$ hotmail account earlier this year. I don't recall what their inactivity timeout was, but it made no sense that it was even triggered given that email is also linked to my active and *paid* M$ Xbox Live account. Supposedly they sent an inactivity warning email first, but of course the secondary email address is one that I use even less often . . .
Inactivity timeouts for some services make sense, but deleting entire email accounts should not be taken as lightly as some compa
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Hotmail and Gmail have the same timeout -- 9 months. Seems reasonable to me. Actually, even four months seems reasonable to me. I'd personally prefer infinity in case I got a coma and medical science advanced and I woke up 3 million years later, but I'll take my chances.
I expect that the standard xbox live privacy policy doesn't let them tell hotmail that they are the "linked" address, even if Microsoft is behind both products (I have not verified this so I could be totally wrong). You wouldn't expect a
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Hotmail and Gmail have the same timeout -- 9 months.
Dunno about hotmail, but Gmail doesn't seem to have such a timeout -- I just logged into some gmail accounts that I haven't touched in years (since 2007 in one case), and all the email was there...