Why did you break delicious?

I have been using delicious since 2003. I have been early adopter and enjoying it from the very beginning. And while I already had some concerns when Yahoo bought delicious in 2005, I stuck to the service as there was nothing else available that simple and fulfilling around.

When I read that Yahoo planned to sell delicious again without putting to much effort in enhancements ever, I have been hoping that there will be changes that will get useful features for the users who stayed while lots of others seemed to have jumped on new services where you are able to store links for offline browsing with previews and categories depending on the content (images, videos, music files, documents, notes, …).

Now changes came. And everything I liked about delicious are gone:

The simple but efficient design is gone and has been replaced with some crappy modern web2.0-like design (everything is round and new colors have been added).
Tag groups (I can’t remember if that was the real name) have been removed, so I don’t have such categories like “database” (tags like “oracle”, “mysql”, “rac”, “mongodb”, …) anymore.
The bookmarklet now opens a new post page, which is not able to auto-complete my tags, so that I have to remember if I always used the tag “hacking” or “coding”.
I am not able to manage my content that well. At the moment there does not seem to be an easy way to remove or rename already used tags. I have to search for all links tagged with the faulty tag and remove it from it.
There will be more, if I take the effort to think about it.

I am pissed. So I have been looking for delicious alternatives lately. But as most users seem to be like using one tool for everything there seem to be more services around like evernote or Zootool.

Don’t get me wrong, I use evernote, too, but I don’t think that it is the best service for easily bookmarking URLs and looking them up everywhere. I prefer the UNIX way: one tool for one thing, that does it well, instead of one tool for everything, that does everything only a bit.

As I did not know too much about Zootool I tried that, too, but when I tried to bookmark the first page with it, I got a site with all the images from that site where I could choose from. I don’t need that.

I then remembered that I already gave blinklist a try when it appeared and re-activated my account my resetting my password. But this process already took me about 15 minutes because the site seemed to be almost down. Nevertheless I imported my delicious bookmarks and tried to switch. But I did not understand how the service should be used as it did not be possible to search the bookmarks efficiently.

Another service I found while searching for alternatives was diigo, which was also able to import all my 1500+ bookmarks from delicious. After the import finished successfully I had the list with my bookmarks and all my tags in diigo, but when I tried to filter by using a tag from the list, diigo was not able to find any bookmarks by that tag. That does not help too much in my opinion.

First I thought that it might be the import’s fault, but bookmarks added by that unnecessary detailed bookmarklet did not work either. They have been added to my bookmark library but it was not possible to look them up again.

Last service I have been testing today sounds a bit like delicious, but did not work too well yet: favilous. I have to admit that I gave up after the initial import of my delicious bookmarks backup stuck for more than 5 minutes and I haven’t been able to get the site back to behave as it should. I really hope I did not break it just by trying to upload a 300 kb file…

What’s next? Right now I am not sure if I am more pissed about the broken delicious service or by looking for a worthy alternative. I have been reading about pinboard, which seems to work pretty well for all who switched since the service started. Only reason why I did not give it a try myself: it actually costs almost $10 to sign up. But because I saw so many web services lately that claim to do a great job (and they probably may do this for lots of people), but did not work for me, I am not sure if I want to spent money and risking that my search won’t be over.

But there are lots of posts available by Google which offer links to much more delicious alternatives, so maybe I will try them all first. Or somebody can name the ultimate delicious alternative and will be able to end my pain…

Why did you break delicious?

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