It's a shame they didn't, because many of us users sure did/do. By virtue of its popularity and simplicity, you could know almost every page with any merit was in its system and tagged, making it easy to discover stuff you hadn't even bookmarked yet.

Example: Want a good Python tutorial about threads? http://www.delicious.com/tag/python+threads+tutorial - You can pretty much pull things out of your ass and constantly find gold on there. Yahoo has no spine.

The outcome is not entirely surprising.

If your security setting blocks using the http://login:pwd@... format, just login to the site and use the link without the login info.

(You can also use wget instead of curl as an alternative.)

I find it hard to believe that Delicious would have no value to anyone at a fire-sale price.

"Big established companies with their own revenue streams simply don’t have the skillset needed to be the next Y Combinator"

Of course, insofar as YC depends on acquisition, there's a problem there too.

@pavs - Where do you work that's better? What ideas have come out of it that are even worthy of having a Hacker News thread? What products do you work on that people love so much they're distraught with a mention of them not existing? Link me, :D.

The real loss here is how you can use it to analyze other people's bookmarks. Almost every page of any merit is tagged and in their system, just because Delicious is/was the biggest game in town.

Wanna find HN links about Java? Try http://www.delicious.com/tag/hn+java .. want a tutorial about making a game in Ruby? http://www.delicious.com/tag/ruby+tutorial+game .. This is absurdly useful even though so few people know about it. It's been my secret weapon for 6 years now because I've always been able to find anything I could even partially remember just by coming up with the tags that might describe it :-(

http://cache.historious.net/cached/841175/

The product has improved significantly over the years, especially after the founders left and Yahoo was able to roll back some of the idiotic policy decisions that they'd previously set in stone.

It used to be that if you posted any pictures not taken with a physical camera, your account would be hellbanned, using the same moderation mechanism (NIPSA) used for people posting porn, and Yahoo has eliminated the practice. The site used to be terrible for actually browsing through photos because the founders still considered it to be primarily a social site and not a photo sharing site (it was originally a MMO called Game NeverEnding), and now Yahoo has ajaxified the photo pages for clicking through photos and finally boosted the default display size to be bigger than 400px. The founders said absolutely no to the idea of ever hosting digicam video clips, and now that they're all gone, Yahoo implemented 'long photos'.

Flickr is proof that Yahoo doesn't fuck everything up.

The link is 1.5 years old, but (IMHO, and anecdotal) Flickr's growth has been steady since about then.

My initial thought would be something along the lines of a 20% profit share for the next three years, guarantee at least $2M over that term, 5% equity in the new firm.

Another angle; recruitment, at least for software developers. For active users, del.icio.us is one of best reflections of your skillset out there, with the exception of github. Potential employers or headhunters pay to search for matching profiles.

$ curl https://user:pass@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > delicious.xml

I was running it from cron to do daily backups.

EDIT: I've just noticed that somebody has already posted a similar command, so sorry for a duplicate.

@idlewords: just make sure you're ready for the possible flood of new users. :)

(1) It looks like pinboard.in has the same function for about the same yearly price.

http://historio.us/referrals/NTEyICAgICAg/

You can do it yourself, in turn, to raise the limit up to 2000.

With so many competing products vying to take its place, it will probably be a while before a de facto bookmarking service comes along and gathers a userbase large enough to be useful and years beyond that for that userbase to build the data to a point that approaches what we had with delicious.

Maybe some sort of anonymized delicious data export would be possible?

Edit: 7 minutes later it's now $6.94

I was also happy to pay for the service following the LastPass acquisition.

It works for me because I don't tag. Instead, I have a stable set of folders into which bookmarks get sorted. At this point, if something doesn't fit one of these categories, it's probably not relevant to me.

However, if you apply for an API key, there are scripts out there that can parse the delicious export and import into Evernote, including tags. Google for 'delicious export evernote script'.