Elegy to my only love in the cloud
Avos did a similar thing last week when they relaunched Delicious while breaking every feature that made their core users so devoted to the site (networks, bundles, subscriptions and feeds). They seemed to have no idea who their most active users were, or how strongly those users cared about the product. In my mind this reinforced the idea that they had bought Delicious simply as a convenient installed base of “like” buttons scattered across the internet, with the intent of building a completely new social site unrelated to saving links.
May you eventually find rest, del.icio.us. You have been undead since the day Yahoo! bought you, and Avos has only desecrated your corpse further. (I think at this point it qualifies as brand necrophilia.)
I made my peace at the beginning of the year – Avos just put the last nail in its coffin as far as I am concerned.
But I am saddened nonetheless.
For posterity, I should note my personalised comical note in this: the Avos zombie version of del.icio.us requires that usernames be at least 3 characters long. So I can no longer log into my account: ap. My ex-account. I could not even download an export of my bookmarks now if I didn’t thankfully have one already.
The worst I feel about this is for Joschua Schachter, and for the people who joined up with him after the Yahoo! acquisition because they understood his aspirations. There is a lesson here: if you care about something, don’t give away control of it – or at the least, not to a corporation. (Joining forces with other people made of flesh and blood is – no, can be – another matter. Choose wisely.)
What a shame.