Not So Delicious Now

Edit: Turns out Delicious is only being sold, not shut down.

I'm not necessarily an early adopter, but I'm not the person who has to be dragged on the bandwagon, kicking and screaming all the way. In other words, I don't fear change, but I also don't embrace change just for the sake of change. What this generally means is that when a new product or service is released, I'm not going to buy it just for the sake of being current. I generally wait to see if it's something that will benefit me. If so, I'm all for it. If not, I'll let it pass. The plus side to this is that I seldom regret buying a product or signing up for a service. The downside is that I sometimes find myself wishing that I'd thrown caution to the wind and embraced the latest thing, just so that I could say I was there when it started.

I suppose that this was a long way of saying that I recently signed up for Delicious. If you aren't familiar with the service, it started back in 2003 as a social bookmarking service. Users added their links, including tags. The site was useful for two reasons. First, it allowed users to add and tag their bookmarks, meaning that they could access a current and neatly organized list of their bookmarks from any location. If you've ever switched computers and lost links or spent ages trying to figure out exactly where you bookmarked that link that you really need, you'll see why this was a good idea. Second, the site kept track of how many people added a bookmark, so it was a great way to see what was popular on a given day.

I've known about the site for ages, back when it was still del.icio.us. I never signed up, mainly because I didn't see a reason to. The idea of a large, systematic list of my bookmarks on a site like that was beyond me. I rarely bookmark sites and, when I do, I tend to do it in such a way that it's virtually impossible to actually find the site when I need it. I finally broke down and signed up a couple of months ago and I've been slowly building my own library of organized, tagged bookmarks.

Unfortunately, I found out today that Yahoo is shutting down Delicious. The timing was interesting for me because I had just decided a couple of days ago that it was pointless to save links to two or more sites (I also use Digg and StumbleUpon). I guess I was wrong about that.

I got off fairly easy, though. I only had a handful of sites that I needed to save, most of which I very easily added to Digg and StumbleUpon. However, looking at some of the comments to the stories, some people were apparently pretty upset. A few people mentioned having over a thousand (one person said 4800) links on Delicious with no backup. If that sounds a little excessive, if someone signed up for Delicious back in even 2004 and saved three links a week, that would come out to over a thousand bookmarks.

This raises a few questions on whether a service like Delicious is a good thing or not. As I said earlier, the benefits are fairly obvious. The user has a list of bookmarks that can be accessed from any computer and won't be erased if there's a problem with the user's computer. As anyone who uses multiple computers or who has lost data due to a computer problem and no backup, those are pretty obvious benefits. The drawback is that the user has little or no control over the content once it's posted. As shown with Delicious, the content disappear with little or no warning.

So what to do? Ignore online services and keep the material on your hard drive and under your control? Post and risk it? Post to multiple sites?

I think that the steps taken should depend on the value of the content. For instance, I read webcomics. When I find a strip that's either very amusing or might be relevant to something in the future, I bookmark it. Given that some of the bookmarks are a couple of years old and haven't been used in that time, losing them wouldn't be a huge tragedy, so why bother backing them up? On the other hand, something like pictures or video might be much more valuable. In that case, a little extra effort might be worthwhile, but it has to be within reason.

For my part, I'm not going to write off online services. Having a copy of important files stored remotely is a good thing. I am, however, going to avoid putting my faith in one service. For instance, for links I know I want to keep, I plan to use both Digg and StumbleUpon. I'm also going to work on keeping the bookmark folder in my browser up-to-date and organized, rather than just bookmarking and letting it go. For photos, I plan to make sure they're organized and tagged on my computer, then post to Flickr and a backup site.

It seems like a good number of the articles and blogs I read mention cloud computing. I think it's a wonderful thing and I think it's going to be used more and more. However, even as I use it more and more (and I know I will), I also plan to keep things organized on my hard drive and to be more diligent about backing things up. Hopefully, I'll be able to implement a system that lets me accomplish both.