Yahoo Trying To Unload Del.icio.us, Not Shut It Down

Friday, 17 December 2010 19:57

Yahoo Trying To Unload Del.icio.us, Not Shut It Down

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Yesterday, a leaked internal Yahoo slide brought us the news that Yahoo will soon be shuttering Del.icio.us, the bookmarking service it bought a few years back. Today, Yahoo has released a statementon the group’s blog. We’ve embedded the the entirety of the blog post below.

Yahoo says that while Delicious doesn’t

have a “strategic fit” at the company, it will not be shutting the service down entirely for now. In fact, it looks like Yahoo is going to find a new home for Delicious (a.k.a. sell).

Of course, unsurprisingly Yahoo is blaming the press for its own PR mismanagement, writing “Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press.” Umm, what? If they would have said all of this yesterday and been more responsive, then there ould not have been so much speculation. It took Yahoo 24 hours to admit that it admit that Delicious won’t be shut down after all?

And this raises the question of whether Yahoo originally planned to “sunset” Delicious and now just changed its mind in the past 24 hours because of all the uproar from users and the press.

I guess judging from the company’s PR strategy throughout the reports of layoffs, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Many of you have read the news stories about Delicious that began appearing yesterday. We’re genuinely sorry to have these stories appear with so little context for our loyal users. While we can’t answer each of your questions individually, we wanted to address what we can at this stage and we promise to keep you posted as future plans get finalized.

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

- No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.
What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

- We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.

What if I want to get my bookmarks out of Delicious right away?

- As noted above, there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it. That said, we have export options if you so choose. Additionally, many services provide the ability to import Delicious links and tags.

We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We’ll let you know more as things develop.