[delicious] Going Once, Going Twice- Sold! To the Lowest Bidder

[thatneedslube]

Awhile back we covered Yahoo's completely unsurprising news about Delicious Bookmarks. If you've forgotten, here's what happened:

1. Delicious was made and it was delicious.


2. Yahoo bought delicious. Fans everywhere cried, seeing the future instantly.*


3. Yahoo then built a competing but shittier service, Yahoo Bookmarks, inside the same organization.


4. Yahoo decided to never fix anything on Delicious again, and instead made it difficult for anyone to use the service without a Yahoo ID as though this were 1996 or something


5. Yahoo is shocked that Delicious is not making them any money even though they didn't monetize the popular service


6. Information is leaked that seems to say Yahoo is shutting down Delicious in the near future


7. The Internets cried out ("Fuck you, you fuckers!)" in anger


8. Yahoo claims they weren't shutting it down, but perhaps selling it for $5 million, since it wasn't profitable.

* It was a dark and dreary future and easily predictable.

Here's the interesting thing: Delicious has now been sold for maybe $2 million, but more likely only $1 million dollars thus proving that Yahoo = Doctor Evil.



It's true, at least according to this Business Insider exclusive, and the good people at actual competing service (unlike Yahoo bookmarks, ahem), Pinboard.



The buyer is StumbleUpon, a service I've never used because right on the main page it gives you the option of signing in with Facebook.

So what can Stumble Upon do for Delicious? We're not exactly sure. Their own promotional video makes some statements that don't sound like the kind of things I want from Delicious, but who knows, maybe they'll offer pro Delicious accounts, which all of Fangasmic has agreed would be a solid idea. Here are a few of their talking points and how we see them relating to our favourite social bookmarking service:

• "You don't want to dig through tonnes of search results, you want to be surprised!" Whenever I think about the Internet surprising me I think of horrible things that I cannot unsee in my brain, and, in this context, So Delicious, So Terrible. One of the reasons I like Delicious is that it's a fair indicator of how popular something is, and then you can judge the terribleness contextually based on tags, the description, and (if we're being honest) who bookmarked it. Will Stumble Upon keep all of the Delicious functionality and remove the hateful Yahoo ID logins? Well, a girl can dream.


• "Stumble Upon finds you the good stuff." So Stumble Upon is like my favourite reccer? But that's basically Delicious right now.


• "...but that you wouldn't think to search for." Listen, Stumble Upon, this is how I wound up reading arranged marriage post-apocalyptic hidden princess cat fic at 4 am once, and because of it, briefly had an ill-advised fling with another fandom that had died ten years ago.

On the other hand, it looks as though you can "like" and "dis-like" links. If Delicious had a dis-like button I would be hitting it all the time. So maybe what Stumble Upon can offer is a more customizable, responsive network/subscriptions function, or better search. Lord knows Yahoo doesn't know anything about search. Or function.

Pros and cons in the comments, people. Let's break this down.