After Techcrunch published the slide, the web lit up with the rumor that Delicious would be shut down. It took Yahoo a full twenty-four hours to respond, an eternity in internet time, and when their official statement did finally come, it didn’t exactly put anyone’s mind at ease. They’re keeping Delicious live for the time being, but they plan to… do what? Sell it? The language is vague.

I’ve loved Delicious since I started using it — here’s my full-length rhapsody on why it’s so valuable to me. Watching Yahoo neglect it has been painful, since there’s a lot of untapped potential. For example, two months before Twitter launched, Delicious rolled its Network feature, which lets you subscribe to other users’ bookmarks. It’s basically a more tightly curated and better annotated version of Twitter. I started going back through my bookmarks to see who else was saving them and following everyone who was coming up with interesting tags and notes. The result is my list of a hundred or so Delicious users who consistently post interesting, useful and entertaining links. I look at my Delicious network feed first thing in the morning, before any news site, or Twitter or anything, because its signal to noise ratio is superb. Yahoo had an opportunity to create a robust social network around the Network feature, and they blew it.

If you’ve invested a lot of effort in curating your Delicious bookmarks, at least you don’t have to worry about losing them. It’s easy to download a backup of them and there are plenty of other services you can upload them to. But having Delicious shut down or just atrophy would be a huge loss because of the accumulated mass of everyone else’s curated bookmarks. Yahoo lets you grab your own data but not everyone else’s, and everyone else’s data is what gives Delicious its value. ReadWriteWeb compares Yahoo’s data policy to “setting a museum on fire.”

Where else are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic? Unfortunately, automated extraction is blocked by the site and the rickety, antiquated API appears focused on returning you little more than your own bookmarks. If there’s a clear way to accomplish export of not just my bookmarks, but all bookmarks with one or more tags, from all users – I haven’t been able to find it yet.Yahoo blocks all automated extraction of data from Delicious. The company apparently is going to let this unique cross between a museum, a library and a crazy old collector’s attic burn to the ground. I’d like to take a few things with me before that happens, please. One community of non-profit technologists has been bookmarking links with the tag “NPTech” for years – they have 24,028 links categorized as relevant for organizations seeking to change the world and peoples’ lives using technology. Wouldn’t it be good to have that body of data, metadata and curated resources available elsewhere once Delicious is gone?

What someone probably ought to do, as Karl Long said to me on Twitter today, is scrape all the public bookmarks and data and put it on Bittorrent. That would be against the rules, though.

Please, please Yahoo! let us save some of what you’ve got, before it goes to waste.

I’ve heard the argument that we’ve been using Delicious for free all these years, so why should we feel entitled to anything? I for one would have appreciated the opportunity to pay for it. I quite happily pay for Flickr, I pay for web hosting, I’d pay for Twitter too. Yahoo never even attempted to monetize Delicious, aside from a little advertising on the popular bookmarks page, which I don’t think I’ve ever used. Yahoo’s focus on the popular bookmarks page misses the point. I don’t care what everyone has been bookmarking. I care what specific smart people who I trust are bookmarking. Mass trends are occasionally interesting, but only occasionally.

With the future of Delicious still in doubt, I followed the example of a bunch of geeks I trust and joined Pinboard. I’m using it to mirror my Delicious bookmarks, and if worse comes to worse, I’ll just move over there completely. There’s much to like about Pinboard. It’s not free, which inspires confidence in me that it won’t just vanish. I like its zany pricing scheme, where they charge a tenth of a cent times the current number of users. (I paid $7.65.) I can also set Pinboard to archive all my tweets if I want, though I haven’t taken them up on this because my tweets aren’t that interesting to me. If I have a profound thought I’ll put it on this blog.

So far, Pinboard seems fine and dandy for my own bookmarks, but it’s missing the social component. Delicious has over five million users, Pinboard (as of this writing) has nine thousand. Those nine thousand are mostly power users, but even so, that’s not the glorious emergent hive-mind that Delicious offers. If my entire network were to migrate over en masse, I guess it wouldn’t be such a big loss, but so far I don’t see that happening.

So what’s to become of my favorite thing on the social web? Former Delicious engineer Stephen Hood runs through the most plausible options on his blog:

Selling Delicious to a third-party

is not a straightforward proposition. As mentioned above, most of the team is now gone. Last week’s leak (and the subsequent fallout) also did unfortunate damage to the Delicious brand, sending panicked users to competing products.

But ultimately the real challenge here will be the technology. During my time at Delicious we rebuilt the entire infrastructure to deeply leverage a number of internal Yahoo technologies. It’s all great stuff but not exactly easy to remove or replace.  Yahoo may have to license some of this technology to the buyer. I’m not sure they’ve done that before.

Open sourcing Delicious

This is a seductive concept but doesn’t make much sense.  As in the case of a sale, they would need to unwind a bunch of proprietary technologies before this could happen.  And open sourcing a complex product isn’t as simple as switching your GitHub repository from private to public.  It involves a lot of work to clean up and document the source.  For Delicious this would add up to a huge effort that would be hard to justify purely on a financial basis. Even then, it’s not clear how an open source social bookmarking system would work, given that much of its value comes from being centralized.

Donating Delicious to the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian

Now we’re getting closer.  While it is folly to assume either of these institutions could take over Delicious and keep it running as a viable service, it does seem like they would be interested in preserving the Delicious corpus and making it available for research.

I love Delicious for many reasons, but chief among them is that it is the Internet’s memory storage device.  In the 7+ years of its existence it has recorded the collective online journeys of millions of users during a time when the Web was evolving dramatically.  Those memories are irreplaceable and have enormous value both to their owners (the users) and to society.

For now, I continue to post to Delicious, mirror in Pinboard, watch and wait. Whoever winds up owning Delicious, I hope they value it properly and show it some love.

Oh, Delicious. I was so excited when I discovered it a few years ago, and it’s been kind of a heartbreak since then. I started out using it for its intended purpose, as a convenient way to store my browser bookmarks online. I still use it for that, though now it’s become more of a public-facing place for research and note-taking. My bookmarks all go to my Facebook profile automatically, in case someone there might find them useful. The particularly interesting ones I also manually post to Twitter.

The heartache comes from the way Yahoo has been managing Delicious since they bought it, or more accurately, not managing it. After a halfhearted redesign, Yahoo has mostly just been ignoring it, especially its rudimentary and poorly designed social features. This is a shame, since I have yet to find a better source of news and items of interest than other users’ bookmarks. I’ve assembled a list of about a hundred people in my network, and their collective posts have a dazzlingly high signal to noise ratio. When I want to see what’s going on in the world or on the net, my Delicious network feed is the first thing I look at, before any news site or blog reader.

Flickr

I don’t take a lot of snapshots, so I’m not putting many actual photos on Flickr. I mostly use it to store graphics like the one at the top of this post. For a while I was also using Flickr as an image blog, a convenient repository for images I found on the web. Now I mostly use Tumblr for random image blogging. But I do love the way Flickr lets you tag and categorize things, it lets me gather and sort research materials in an intuitive way. Flickr is extremely well search engine optimized, and it supports a robust ecosystem of secondary aggregators and rebloggers. If you put something on Flickr and license it Creative Commons, you’re guaranteed to get a bunch of clicks on it.

Everything I post on Flickr goes to Facebook automatically. When I mark someone else’s image as a favorite, it goes to my Tumblr, and from there to Facebook, the logic being that these pictures are likely to be interesting to my friends. Since Yahoo owns Flickr, bookmarking the images on Delicious is elegant, with automatic thumbnail generation. Even so, I don’t find myself bookmarking images too often. If something is that fascinating, usually I’ll find a reason to work it into a blog post.

Tumblr

I mostly use Tumblr for stuff that’s too random or trivial to merit a full blog post. It’s an effortless one-click process to reblog someone else’s Tumblr post, so I do that a lot. I stream my Flickr favorites here because their randomness fits the Tumblr vibe well. Everything I put on Tumblr goes automatically to Facebook, because why not, and hopefully it’s not so many posts that it’s annoying to people.

Facebook

Yes, it’s evil. But all my friends are on there, and increasingly my relatives too. My policy is to only friend people I know in real life, though I’ve made a few exceptions for cool folks I’ve met on the internet. It’s convenient to have almost everyone I know in one place, but I don’t trust FB with anything too personal.

For a while I had my blog posts going to FB automatically via RSS. I had to stop, though, because the way FB handles blog feeds is so irritating. FB renders imported blog posts as static snapshots. This is no good for me, because I tend to publish my posts when they’re still a bit unfinished, and then copyedit them after they’ve gone live. It keeps me from being too fussy and precious. Also, I use my stats to guide the allocation of my finite editorial resources — posts that people are reading more, I edit more. Having static snapshots full of mistakes on FB does me no good. Also, any comments that people were making on the FB posts aren’t visible to readers here (and vice versa.) So now I manually add links to new blog posts.

Twitter

I’ve resisted the temptation to cross-post my tweets to Facebook because I find it irritating when other people do it. My FB and Twitter friend lists overlap a fair bit and I don’t like reading all those 140-character witticisms twice. Also, on FB I’m writing exclusively for people who know me personally, whereas on Twitter I’m mostly writing for strangers, so the voice and content are different. I do send recent tweets to my blog sidebar automatically, I don’t find that too spammy when other people do it.

This blog

Nearly all the substantial personal writing I’ve done for the past few years has taken place here. There’s something about the public-facing aspect of blogging that keeps my fires burning. I love the WordPress platform for the way it facilitates my creative thinking like few other computer tools I’ve used.

LinkedIn

I keep my online resume here on the blog, but I like LinkedIn a lot and foresee it playing a greater role in my professional life over time. It has its own status updates, but that’s one too many statuses for me to be updating, so I just stream my work Twitter feed in there.

Friendfeed

There was a while there when I was so infatuated with Friendfeed that I made it the centerpiece of my personal home page. What could be a better landing page than an automatic aggregate of everything else I post on the social web? Well, as it turns out, there are a lot of problems with posting an unfiltered lifestream. While a comprehensive listing of everything I post everywhere is useful and interesting to me, it’s not so useful or interesting to anyone else. Looking at other people’s lifestreams is mostly just exhausting.

There’s also the problem of duplicate content. Let’s say I bookmark something on Delicious and also post it to Twitter. Friendfeed displays both posts. There’s no way that I know of to recognize and eliminate duplicates automatically. For a while I tried deleting duplicates manually, but that was too annoying. I still keep my Friendfeed active, though, both for communitarian and cynical reasons. The communitarian reason is that there are some people out there who like the lifestreaming format. It’s not a lot of people, but they do exist. The cynical reason is search engine optimization. A link on an automatic Friendfeed post counts to Google’s spiders, even if no human ever clicks it.

So, there you have it. I’m about to embark on a new social media consulting job, and that’ll probably extend my web footprint. Like, I just joined Foursquare and Yelp, not because I have much need for them personally, but because they’re significant for clients and I need to know how they work.

This landscape shifts fast, so maybe I’ll come back to this post down the road and chuckle at how obsolete it is. I still have a MySpace profile that I can’t figure out how to delete. Who knows which of the profiles above are going to look similarly comical in a few years?

Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.

This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me non-hypothetical real-world benefits.

The stats on my blog are a writerly gold mine. Anybody who clicks on one of my posts is voting for the ideas in that post. I tend to put stuff up when it’s about two thirds of the way done. Posts that get a lot of hits and comments get more attention and revision from me. My readers decide collectively what gets more attention, what gets polished up into presentable prose and what gets left as free form public note-taking. The really hot ones, about the Funky Drummer or Delicious or Auto-tune The News, are smooth and polished like the rocks in a particularly lively river.

No surprise: the internet loves Michael Jackson and Lil Wayne. Surprises: the internet loves math. Especially dividing by zero. The internet also loves quantum mechanics and its broad overlaps with musical harmonics.

Even better than the stats are the commenters. Moderating my comments is one of the most fun aspects of blogging. I get to be the editor of my own private little Atlantic Monthly. Asking for comments has been a good way for me to crowdsource research, mobilizing my smart friends and any internet stranger who happens along to gather unexpected new data.

I don’t approve all of my comments. Any blog attracts a lot of automated spam comments, some of which slip past the filter. Fortunately, spam is easily spotted. As for hate mail, I don’t get very much. Usually people who disagree with me just stop reading and move on. Long, thoughtful disagreement is even more rare. When someone does disagree with me at length, I take it as a token of respect and am happy to post and respond. This guy’s comment was an opportunity for me to practice my grownup debating skills, learning to disagree agreeably. This is a growth area for me, and the blog has been good for practicing.

Blogging from the iPhone has turned out to be an unexpected treat. I would have expected the phone to be a severely limited blogging tool compared to the full screen and keyboard. For editing HTML, the phone is not the right tool for the job, but it’s perfectly fine for writing prose. Editing and moderating from the WordPress iPhone app is still cumbersome, but the fact that it even exists and they give it away free is a near miracle. I wrote most of this post while waiting in lines. Who needs a Game Boy?

It amazes me now that I ever tried to organize my thoughts any other way.

Consider this image:

For most of us, music is the most familiar context for a cassette tape. But you can store any kind of data on a cassette, not just audio. Back in the seventies and early eighties, cassettes were a popular computer data storage medium. Seeing this picture on the same screen as Alan Turing led me to the insight that a cassette with an operating system stored on it is a perfect physical analogy to the concept of a Turing machine. Then I see the Apple cassette on the same screen as Run-DMC, because in the late Jam Master Jay’s hand is a cassette deck.

It brings the connection back home to music, leading me to the idea that music and computer programs might be kind of the same thing. From there it takes me to the idea that music is made of algorithms. From there, I get the idea that maybe memes are algorithms for getting themselves copied, and maybe genes are too. Like I said: useful.

The whole experience has proven to me that I can shuffle images together into a narrative way more easily than hunks of text, no matter how cool Scrivener’s index card view is. I’ll bet there are a whole lot of artsy types out there like me who would be having an easier time in their writing life if they got hip to visual outlining.

I’m finding also that I like developing my ideas in public, throwing images out there and seeing how people react to them. I used to play jazz guitar, and now I laptop DJ. I like improvising in front of an audience. Coming up with ideas is only the front half of creativity. The equally important back half is the pruning, the editing, the rejections, the natural selection. Social writing and image gathering is like social music. When you’re trying to impress other people, you instinctively prune based on what’s going to be the least annoying to everyone, what’s going to raise your social standing. The more time I spend trying out my ideas in public, the more sophisticated and adaptive they become.

You can make folders for your images, known in Flickr as sets. You can also make collections, which are sets of sets. A particular image can belong to as many different sets as you want. And Flickr also supports tags, for another layer of more associative sorting.

All the way around, Flickr is a slick piece of interface design. Anybody trying to create a dashboard for a large, complex database will find a lot of inspiration there.

Like Delicious, Flickr offers a variety of creative alternative display methods. One of its simplest and most delightful toys is the randomizing web site badge. I have mine set to choose three images at random. It chooses a different three every time you refresh the page. Here’s my most serendipitous threesome so far:

Just sitting there and playing random images against each other could keep me supplied with creative nonfiction inspiration for basically ever.

Flickr gives you a lot of nuanced feedback on your viewers. Here are my most popular photos according to Flickr’s interestingness measure, a weighted sum of page views, favorites and comments. For some reason, the image below is the internet’s favorite thing I’ve ever posted, by a large margin. This is probably because I titled it using the word “Matrix,” inadvertantly guaranteeing that it shows up in a lot of google searches.

I myself did not create this image. Some random person on the intertubes did. I found it unattributed on Ffffound. I do a lot of reblogging with Flickr, which is not exactly what the terms of use had in mind, but everything I’m doing could be reasonably characterized as fair use, so I don’t think Flickr minds. I’m not making any money whatsoever from reblogging images. (I wish!) I’m scrupulous about including links to original sites when I can find them. If I include an image from pop culture, like an M.I.A. album cover or something, it’s in the context of an enthusiastic endorsement, the kind of heartfelt word-of-mouth that drives most sales, so I doubt the artists mind either.

In your daily stat report, Flickr lists all the Google and Yahoo image searches that resulted in a view of one of your images. It does something better, actually, it links to those searches. If I post a picture of a cool molecule or interesting knot or colorful bird, a bunch of science students find their way to it immediately. Usually their searches turn up some other cool molecule or knot or bird pictures as well, a rich source of new material for me. And so the cycle continues.

Why is storing your bookmarks online such a good idea?

Having your bookmarks online makes them accessible from any computer. There’s also the added insurance against something bad happening to your computer, like spilling coffee into it twice in a month, like I did. That’s well and good, but it’s only the tip of the Delicious iceberg. I mean, there are plenty of ways to back up your bookmarks online. Why, I get asked a lot, do I want the whole world looking at my bookmarks? I get something very powerful in return, getting to look at everybody else’s bookmarks. More importantly, I can see how everyone else sorts and annotates their stuff.

Tagging is the best way to organize knowledge

If, like I have, you embark on a major internet research project or three, you quickly amass an enormous number of bookmarks. Keeping them all sorted is the only way to make them useful. The problem with conventional bookmarking is the problem with most computer ontologies. Everything has to go in a particular folder or subfolder, meaning it can’t go in any of the other folders. This unambiguous hierarchical tree is well-suited to the way the computer stores data, but it’s not well-suited to the way your brain works.

The human brain works by creating associations between ideas. Given a word, we can effortlessly free-associate from it, connecting memories, experiential knowledge, words that meaninglessly rhyme, and so on. We don’t do so well memorizing rigid binary sorting systems, even if we ourselves were the ones who set them up.

This isn’t just an intellectual limitation on our part. Designing rigid categories is a maddening process because there are always exceptions to any category, or items that belong in many categories, or items that seemingly belong to no category at all. It only gets worse when you have an elaborate recursive tree of folders within folders within folders to contend with. Information in the brain is made of associative networks with a high-dimensional, multiply-connected topology. It’s impossible to impose tree structures on our thoughts without losing a lot of valuable connections. What you really want is for a multiply-connected network-shaped filing system to spontaneously and flexibly emerge from its contents.

Delicious doesn’t sort your knowledge for you, but it comes closer than any other information-tracking system I’ve used, on the computer or off. To heck with the Dewey Decimal System. Instead of exclusive folders, Delicious has you describe each bookmark with a list of tags. For me, coming up with tags is a delightful little free-associative writing exercise in and of itself. If the page you’re bookmarking has been bookmarked by someone else, and it probably has, Delicious shows you the tags that person used used. If a whole bunch of people have bookmarked it, then it shows you the most commonly used tags. You can select the ones that suit your particular mental filing system and ignore the others.

So for instance, there’s a blog called Cute Otters, which is devoted to pictures of, you guessed it:

If I’m going to bookmark this blog, where should it go? I have a fun tag, that would be the obvious choice, but I have a zillion other things there, and it would get buried. Ditto photography, funny and blogs. I don’t have a cute tag because I’m not secure enough in my manhood. I could do biology or mammals, but those include too many non-cute, non-funny entries. There’s no point in having an otters tag, since it probably won’t get used more than once. Really, what I want is to be able to use any of those descriptors, plus whatever others I can think of. Then later I can stumble on this blog through any number of different paths.

Tagging can be a bit of a chore at the outset, at least until you have your personal system worked out. Other users’ tags are rarely perfect, but they’re a good jumping off point. For Cute Otters, the recommendations include video, photography, mammals, funny, fun and blogs. Folksonomy isn’t perfect. Delicious sees “otter” and “otters” as two different tags. It falls to you to decide what the rules are going to be. Nouns? Verbs? Slangy? Serious? It’s up to you, but if your system is going to work, you do need to make some definite choices and stick to them.

Other Delicious users are an incredibly valuable resource

Once you’ve saved a given bookmark, you can click back through and see which Delicious users bookmarked it too, and all the other items they’ve bookmarked. And now comes the truly social part of social bookmarking. Chances are that if a given Delicious user has bookmarked a few of the same web sites as you, they’re broadly interested in what you’re interested in. You can sign up to follow any user’s public posts.

Over the year and a half I’ve been using it, I’ve collected a network of a hundred or so people, nearly all of whom are total strangers to me. These people live in California and Japan and Finland and China and everywhere else in the internet-centric world. They’re out there as I type this, assiduously combing the internet for stuff that I probably find interesting and posting it here. I check in on my Delicious network’s posts five or seven or seventeen times a day. The signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically higher than on any of the blogs or news media I read.

Within my network is a core group, folks who frequently post the same stuff as me, whose stuff I often repost, and who repost a lot of my stuff. Now some of them are even sending me links directly. Here’s every bookmark I’ve discovered through a fellow Delicious user. Here are all of my bookmarks that have been saved by someone else. And if you’re already a Delicious user, here’s a fun graphical way to explore your extended network.

Delicious is a way to connect to a community of like-minded internet strangers

Modern life is lonely. Our monkeyspheres are scattered across appalling distances. Our face-to-face contact with even our close families is so limited as to shock my Polish in-laws. The sense of community that humans took for granted for most of evolutionary history is a scarce emotional commodity here in America. We have to find it where we can. Delicious isn’t a substitute for a closely-knit monkeysphere, but it has some adaptive benefits of its own. It puts me in much closer touch with the memes, and it gives me a chance to participate in a big conversation, to give and receive, to be led down unexpected paths, to drink from an informational firehose that would have made my bookish ancestors weak in the knees. Delicious has some of the same pleasure for me that the Park Slope Food Co-op has, the chance to connect with people, to participate in something bigger than myself, both for broad emotional reasons and for simple practicality.

Your Delicious activity reveals your own emergent thoughts

Once you have a whole bunch of tags, new patterns begin to emerge among them. Your Delicious tags reveal the topology of your own thoughts to you in endless novel permutations. Here’s a cloud of my most frequently-used tags. Click any one to see all the bookmarks that have that tag.

Delicious is a great jumping off point for writing

If I want to write something about anything, my first step is take a look at my pertinent Delicious tags. So if I’m going to work on, say, something about Alan Turing, my first step is to look at all my bookmarks tagged Turing. In addition to tagging, Delicious has a text field where you can put in relevent notes and quotes. A lot of the time, I can fit all of the important information in a bookmark page into the annotation field. By default, if you highlight a block of text before you bookmark a page, it automatically gets added to the notes field. I’m assiduous about my note taking, so I usually don’t need to visit my bookmarked sites. I just copy and paste the whole page into a text file and then prune, prune, prune.

Flickr is the second most useful site on the social web. It shares many of Delicious’ best qualities, like tagging and the rich inspiration of other users. Here are my Flickr items tagged with Delicious. After looking at my Turing tag on Delicious, my next move would be to take a look at my Turing tag on Flickr.

This post has taken on a life of its own on Delicious

For maximum recursive enjoyment, here are all the Delicious users who have bookmarked this very post. Update: more than thirty people have bookmarked it so far. Reading their summaries is a whole new layer of meta-insight for me, showing what people take away from my writing, often not the passages I’m expecting. The “new module of my brain” line was a jokey toss-off, but several Delicious users quoted it: britta, cmakvaca, rgreco, ABoothroyd, leeinaustin and arosner. So now I’m reconsidering its importance.