Pinboard Acquires Delicious ⇥ blog.pinboard.in
A short history of Pinboard and Delicious, as told in four excerpts by ex-Yahoo/Delicious employee and now Pinboard lord and king, Maciej Cegłowski.
There have been two big surprises in the past six months. The first was discovering that a minimalist paid bookmarking site can effectively compete against delicious, a free service that has all the resources of Yahoo at its disposal, a five year headstart, and until the recent layoffs employed some thirty people. Yahoo management single-handedly created our market with a series of terrible product decisions, and has continued to push the yoke forward and keep the nose pointed straight at the ground.
On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs. Around 11 AM someone at this meeting showed a slide with a couple of Yahoo properties grouped into three categories, one of which was ominously called “sunset”. The most prominent logo in the group belonged to Delicious, our main competitor. Milliseconds later, the slide was on the web, and there was an ominous thundering sound as every Delicious user in North America raced for the exit.
Delicious was ultimately saved from sunsetting by being passed from one company to another, never staying very long under any particular ownership.
I recently heard from a competitor, let’s call them ACME Bookmarking Co., who are looking to leave the bookmarking game and sell their website.
Cegłowski may be calling them “ACME” here, but he’s clearly talking about Delicious.
Today, June 2017:
Pinboard has acquired Delicious.
[…]
Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.
A fitting end to a multiyear saga. If I could find a way to do justice to that Italian “kissing fingers” gesture in words, I would.