Del.icio.us
Encyclopedia
Delicious is a social bookmarking
web service
for storing, sharing, and discovering web
bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter
in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo!
in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URL
s. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California
.
The site was re-sold to AVOS Systems
on April 27, 2011 and relaunched in a "back to beta" state on 27 September that year.
each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy
). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL
". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by other users.
Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of Internet meme
s and trends.
Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Many features have contributed to this, including the website's simple interface, human-readable
URL
scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST
-like API
, and RSS
feeds for web syndication
.
Use of Delicious is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user can download his or her own data through the site's API in an XML
or JSON
format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.
All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; the site is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections. Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS
feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature can be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.
There are several competing social bookmarking websites as well as a few open source
clones.
. In September 2003, Schachter released the first version of Delicious. In March 2005, he left his day job to work on Delicious full-time, and in April 2005 it received approximately $2 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures
and Amazon.com
.
Yahoo!
acquired
Delicious on December 9, 2005. Various guesses suggest it was sold for somewhere between US$15 million and US$30 million.
On December 16, 2010, an internal slide from a Yahoo! meeting leaked, indicating that Delicious would be "sunsetted" in the future, which seemed to mean "shut down".
Later Yahoo clarified that they would be selling Delicious, not ending it.
On April 27, 2011, Delicious announced the site was sold to Avos Systems
, a company created by Chad Hurley
and Steve Chen
. Unbeknownst to members, Yahoo! operated the site until September 2011.
On September 27, 2011, Delicious launched its completely new version 3.0 design in beta. This came in as a surprise to many of its users, with many features being disabled, removed or temporarily unavailable. Avos removed the Delicious Support Forum and had advised users that communication with Avos should take place via email. Reaction from users was overwhelmingly negative.
" domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack
, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect to the new domain, delicious.com.
In an interview, Schachter explained how he chose the name: "I'd registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words. In early discussions, a friend referred to finding good links as 'eating cherries' and the metaphor stuck, I guess."
On September 6, 2007, Schachter announced the website's name would change to "Delicious" when the site would be redesigned. The new design went live on July 31, 2008.
On June 16, 2011, AVOS Systems
acquired d.me domain name.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....
web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
for storing, sharing, and discovering web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter
Joshua Schachter
Joshua Schachter is the creator of Delicious, creator of GeoURL, and co-creator of Memepool. He has a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh....
in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
s. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...
.
The site was re-sold to AVOS Systems
AVOS Systems
AVOS Systems, Inc., is an Internet company founded by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. In April 2011, it was announced AVOS purchased Delicious, with the transition occurring in June 2011....
on April 27, 2011 and relaunched in a "back to beta" state on 27 September that year.
Site description
Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tagTag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...
). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL
delicious.com/tag/wiki displays all of the most recent links tagged "wikiWiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by other users.
Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of Internet meme
Internet meme
The term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...
s and trends.
Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Many features have contributed to this, including the website's simple interface, human-readable
Human-readable
A human-readable medium or human-readable format is a representation of data or information that can be naturally read by humans.In computing, human-readable data is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than presented in a binary representation...
URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST
Representational State Transfer
Representational state transfer is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation...
-like API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
, and RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
feeds for web syndication
Web syndication
Web syndication is a form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites. Most commonly, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary or update of the website's recently added content...
.
Use of Delicious is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user can download his or her own data through the site's API in an XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
or JSON
JSON
JSON , or JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange. It is derived from the JavaScript scripting language for representing simple data structures and associative arrays, called objects...
format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.
All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; the site is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections. Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature can be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.
There are several competing social bookmarking websites as well as a few open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
clones.
History
The precursor to Delicious was Muxway, a link blog that had grown out of a text file that Schachter maintained to keep track of links related to MemepoolMemepool
Memepool is a multiple-author weblog, active from 1998 to 2008, that lists links to interesting, obscure, weird, or funny items on the web along with a bit of commentary...
. In September 2003, Schachter released the first version of Delicious. In March 2005, he left his day job to work on Delicious full-time, and in April 2005 it received approximately $2 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures is a venture capital firm based in New York City, New York, United States.The firm was founded by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham in 2004...
and Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
.
Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
acquired
Mergers and acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions refers to the aspect of corporate strategy, corporate finance and management dealing with the buying, selling, dividing and combining of different companies and similar entities that can help an enterprise grow rapidly in its sector or location of origin, or a new field or...
Delicious on December 9, 2005. Various guesses suggest it was sold for somewhere between US$15 million and US$30 million.
On December 16, 2010, an internal slide from a Yahoo! meeting leaked, indicating that Delicious would be "sunsetted" in the future, which seemed to mean "shut down".
Later Yahoo clarified that they would be selling Delicious, not ending it.
On April 27, 2011, Delicious announced the site was sold to Avos Systems
AVOS Systems
AVOS Systems, Inc., is an Internet company founded by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. In April 2011, it was announced AVOS purchased Delicious, with the transition occurring in June 2011....
, a company created by Chad Hurley
Chad Hurley
Chad Meredith Hurley is an American co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of the popular video sharing website YouTube. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "50 People Who Matter Now" list...
and Steve Chen
Steve Chen (YouTube)
Steven Shih "Steve" Chen is a Chinese Taiwanese American and a co-founder and previous Chief Technology Officer of the popular video sharing website YouTube.- Early years and education :...
. Unbeknownst to members, Yahoo! operated the site until September 2011.
On September 27, 2011, Delicious launched its completely new version 3.0 design in beta. This came in as a surprise to many of its users, with many features being disabled, removed or temporarily unavailable. Avos removed the Delicious Support Forum and had advised users that communication with Avos should take place via email. Reaction from users was overwhelmingly negative.
Name
The "del.icio.us.us
.us is the Internet country code top-level domain for the United States and was established in 1985. Registrants of .us domains must be United States citizens, residents, or organizations, or a foreign entity with a presence in the United States...
" domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack
Domain hack
A domain hack is an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain , to spell out the full "name" or title of the domain. Examples include del.icio.us , goo.gl and fold.it...
, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect to the new domain, delicious.com.
In an interview, Schachter explained how he chose the name: "I'd registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words. In early discussions, a friend referred to finding good links as 'eating cherries' and the metaphor stuck, I guess."
On September 6, 2007, Schachter announced the website's name would change to "Delicious" when the site would be redesigned. The new design went live on July 31, 2008.
On June 16, 2011, AVOS Systems
AVOS Systems
AVOS Systems, Inc., is an Internet company founded by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. In April 2011, it was announced AVOS purchased Delicious, with the transition occurring in June 2011....
acquired d.me domain name.
External links
- Blog.delicious.com
- YouTube Founders Revamping a Site for Link Sharing, Jenna Wortham, The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, September 11, 2011