The word on the street, the SEO street mostly, is that Yahoo are going to be making some more drastic cuts. Last year they shut down Geocities, the free webpages that so many clubs and small businesses used, and now there are strong rumours that they are going to close down Delicious and Altavista as well as Yahoo Buzz.
Now, I can understand them shutting down Altavista (should have just redirected it to Yahoo/Bing search years ago) and never actually looked at Yahoo Buzz (although quick research ranks it as the 3rd most popular social bookmarking site after Twitter and Digg), but think that switching off Delicious is going to make a lot of people angry.
Delicious is a social bookmarking site, which means people can store book marks on a webpage that they can not only access anywhere, but also share with other people, like this: delicious.com/jonpaulwade – not a great example, but it is mine.
As you can see, Yahoo do not monetize it at all, no ads to be seen, so it makes sense that it is a drain on their resources (server, bandwidth costs, maintenance costs etc.) but so many people use Delicious that a lot of people are going to be at a loss.
At least unlike with the Geocities closure people that want Delicious will find out about it closing down much quicker, and have many options for migrating. Such as….
How To Transfer Delicious Bookmarks To Another Site
From your Delicious account go to the settings page, and chose download / export, or just click here: https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export
This method simple creates an HTML file, which on its own is not of much use to you. Well, you can open it in a browser, but you cannot add, remove or share it with anyone else. In fact, here is the one I have just exported and saved to this server: webologist.co.uk/delicious-20101216.htm
As you can see, it is just a file with all the bookmarks. So, you have not lost all your precious bookmarks just yet (remember, you can open your own file in your browser).
So, what if you want to use them in a more efficient manner?
How To Import Delicious Bookmarks Into Your Browser
Most browsers have an import function that will import Delicious bookmarks. I use Google Chrome, and here it is easy to import your Delicious bookmarks:
Click the Spanner > Bookmark Manager > Organise > Import
This opens an upload window, you just click on your recently downloaded Delicious .htm file (will have to chose “all files” bottom right of Chrome window as .htm does not show by default) and then select the file and open.
All the bookmarks will be in an “Imported” folder at the bottom of the bookmarks list. You can move them to wherever you like.
Safe For The Future
Chrome is going places, unlike the other web browsers. Once Google Chrome OS is available on notebooks, you will be able to store your bookmarks in your browser and never lose it, and use them whereever you are. Fantastic!
There is also an extension for Chrome, called Delicious Chrome extension, that automagically downloads as you go.
What Else Can You Do Now? Import To Google Bookmarks
You can also import your Delicious bookmarks to:
- Google provide some neat instructions on how to import to Google bookmarks (I never use Google bookmarks, I had forgotten it exists…. will look now). What are Google bookmarks? “Unlike del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks keeps your favorite web pages private and lets you search their content. You can manage your bookmarks from the site, using Google Toolbar for IE or using some unofficial Firefox extensions.” To import you bookmarks you need to use a custom script that is provided by Google – http://persistent.info/delicious2google/ – you just enter your Delicious user name and password and Google takes over!
- Your Google Bookmarks can be found here: https://google.com/bookmarks (with Google account). I seem to have many, and just remembered that I used to use Google Bookmarks inside iGoogle (actually it is http://google.com/ig ) when I was working for the banks in London as it was much better than saving personal bookmarks to a work PC.
I am sure that there are other non-Google options, but frankly, why bother? Yahoo was once solid as a rock, and now it is crumbling at the edges, it’s exfoliating (that Geography degree coming in handy again). May as well put all your eggs in the Google basket for now.
