With the announcement that Yahoo! will retire Delicious, MyBlogLog, Altavista and other Yahoo! services, WordPress users around the world will have their blogging habits change.
UPDATE: I’ve updated the news on WordCast with Delicious Lives – Yahoo! Might Not. Yahoo! and Delicious announced that Delicious will not close. They are looking at selling or spinning it off but the people behind Delicious are committed to its continued existence. See the post for more details.
For the thousands of WordPress bloggers who use Delicious in many ways, including creating Link Posts automatically on their blogs, featuring Delicious links in their sidebar, and using it to bookmark websites and pages for reference in writing their blog posts, your bookmarking habits and publishing techniques will change.
The loss of Delicious will mean that those WordPress Plugins will stop working, as well other methods. Link Posts have lost their value over the past year as more and more people share links and quick reference tips through Twitter and Facebook rather than in a weekly link summary post on their blogs. Still, many do, and this technique will either have to change or end.
In the article on WordCast I wrote about the closing of Delicious, I added tips on how to export your Delicious bookmarks to protect them and use them in other creative ways. I’ll be publishing more on that in the next few days, helping you save those precious links.
I’m also concerned about the closing of MyBlogLog. Many bloggers jumped onto that social networking wagon and have stuffed their sidebars full of MyBlogLog widgets, stuffed with micro thumbnail pictures of fellow friend bloggers. This is now replaced easily by the various WordPress Plugins for Facebook.
On a personal note, I’m also sad to see AltaVista go. On that day, an important piece of Internet history will disappear. Long before Google, AltaVista was my search engine of choice, my gateway beyond link lists and directories to the possible on the web. I thrived on Babel Fish to provide instant machine translations of text and web pages. 
While not perfect, it was the first web-based translation application and opened up my world to what others had to say in a language not my own. I also liked it as it was named for the translation “fish” put into the ears of characters from the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a long time favorite book and show.
With the news that Ask.com with Ask Jeeves closed last month, Yahoo! abandoning their search engine to Microsoft Bing, a lot of the building blocks of the original web are gone. I feel about these the same way I do about the death of Blake Edwards, Richard Holbrooke, and the last episode tonight of Larry King.
I don’t need to say more. You know the feeling.
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11 Comments
I know it is a typo but with so many years under my belt I can relate to “…a lot of the building bloods of the original web are gone.”
Born to Black and White TV and a rotary phone that was on a party line, what a world we live in today.
Peace my friend!
LOL! Fixed. Thanks. Love spell check when in a hurry.
And I agree. We’ve come so far, and yet we have so much further to go. Wonder how much of that further we’re going to see?
Yes you are right things do change. I liked delicious because I could easily sync my favourites across several computers that I work in regularly. That all changed for me when I was able to sync my gmail account using Chrome. Now I can easily follow my favourites. There other sidestep here is that I have all but stopped using Firefox. I keep Internet Explores and Safari on my system for the odd occasions when Chrome behaves badly.
I also fondly remember AltaVista I used it regularly but became seduced by the now all present Google.
When I stop and think about it Google is everywhere, at least I have resisted Blogger in favour of WordPress.
I do enjoy your blog and keep track vis RSS (is that Google again)
Del.icio.us/delicious.com, digg, and so forth, eventually many of them would die.
Why did the altavista owners sell to yahoo! in the first place?
@Miroslav: They didn’t. AltaVista sold to another company and that company was bought by Yahoo!
@Bernie: Thanks for the kind words. It’s amazing how much we’ve just accepted Google into almost every area of our life. Sometimes it’s good to stop and think – and maybe reconsider the omnipotence.
The internet is going through the same consolidation phase that all industries do. Look at railways at the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds and hundreds of different ones each serving a short set of tracks. Today there are very few with tens of thousands of miles each.
@Bernie: It almost sounds like you’re alluding to Firefox as if it were a dying browser. It’s not. It’s still under active development. Firefox 4 is on the way, and will bring with it many wonderful new features. I will never use Chrome because it’s a Google product. I can’t trust a company whose CEO says things like, “Google policy is get right up to the creepy line and not cross it… We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
That’s an actual quote from Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. It was made on October 1st, 2010.
One of the reasons I use Firefox is specifically because there are add-ons available that can block Google from spying on me. I take full advantage of them every day, and will continue to. Long live Firefox. Jeers to Big Brother Google and peoples’ acceptance of its terrible privacy practices.
The closing of Alta Vista hits me too. More than MyBlogLog which became garbage over the years with sploggers pushing you to add them. More than Delicious, which I trusted to be there and keep my bookmarks and was sure one day I’d have time to tag them all. Alta Vista is Internet history. The only thing I can think of that would be a sadder loss would be the old newsgroups which Google now keeps archived. Alta Vista was the first site I ever searched from. Then I tried Excite, which is also gone. I had my first website on GeoCities, also gone. I ran my first group on another service swallowed up by Yahoo only to be closed down two years later (can’t even remember the name of it now). Although we can’t keep and support everything, history can never be replaced.
@thatgrrl You took the words right out of my mouth! First site on GeoCities. Fond memories of Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista (which was amazing in its day). I found MyBlogLog probably after its prime. And yes, I always longed for the day when I’d be able to take full advantage of Delicious’ power.
Are you thinking of eGroups? While many more folks worry about what happens to Flickr if Yahoo goes under, I truly fear what happens to the Yahoo Groups service and archive. What a valuable resource that is!
Long live AltaVista! It too was my search engine of choice, and for some time too, even after the ascendancy of the big G. BTW, as much as Google’s search engine as thrived and progressed, they should be careful of the young up-and-comers. After all, Bing is challenging for #2 out of the ashes of MSN’s poor #3 ranking, and we all thought AV was the bomb until Google came along.
Am thrilled to see that Del.icio.us (yes, I prefer the old name!) will live on – wasn’t too psyched about having to migrate to something else (and what really?).
@Khalid — I am also very relieved that delicious is not gone, yet, but I am sure it will be greatly transformed, in some way, and hopefully, a good way, once it is sold.
I am glad to have found your blog, Lorelle. Thanks for sharing some great stuff!
–Donna
P.S.
I also was an AltaVista user pre-Google. LOL! It’s amazing how exponentially fast things are changing now.
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[…] You’ve probably already seen the uproar around Yahoo spinning off Delicious. First it was they were going to close. Next they were going to spin it off. Either way, I’m looking around for a replacement. From “Saying Goodbye to Delicious, MyBlogLog, AltaVista, and Larry King « Lorelle on WordPressR… […]