In memoriam
del.icio.us
Born 2003. Died June 2017.
del.icio.us was founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter as a personal tool for managing the overwhelming abundance of the early web. It became, unexpectedly, a civic project: a shared index of what the internet found worth reading, organised by human judgment into tags rather than algorithms. At its height it held the bookmarks of millions, and its tag clouds were a living map of collective attention.
Yahoo acquired it in 2005 for a reported thirty million dollars and proceeded, across six years, to accomplish very little with it. It passed thereafter to AVOS Systems, then to Science Inc., and finally in 2017 to Maciej Cegłowski of Pinboard, who announced its closure with the directness that had always eluded its custodians. It was survived by its data, partially, and by the memory of a web in which human beings, rather than engagement engines, decided what mattered.
I have purchased Delicious and will be shutting it down. — Maciej Cegłowski, Pinboard, June 2017
Acquired and neglected
Mourned by Mourned by the early web's curators — bloggers, researchers, librarians, and the architects of link culture who trusted it with everything they found worth keeping.
Pinboard carries forward the practice of deliberate, human bookmarking; the del.icio.us tag cloud endures as a symbol of a web that once organised itself from the bottom up.