The erstwhile service, Delicious was a mark of doing one thing and only one thing, but doing it well (I have deliberately linked to it here, an homage to a service that was a joy to use). Sites such as StumbleUpon, Diigo were a call back to the times when discovering unconnected websites without having to give up privacy. Almost everyone I know had a bookmarklet, a plugin or a custom setup to post to del.icio.us. It was a service, that was rich and led to a number of use cases. Almost anyone who wanted to learn text analysis and information retrieval would use del.icio.us as a data set after having been IP-banned from Wikipedia.

As is the case, the transition of del.icio.us to Yahoo! led to a number of issues, breaking workflows that people had and eventually being so buggy that it led to a number of alternatives and open-source clones. The simplicity of the service also did mean that there were a number of PHP, Perl and ASPX clones that survived beyond this phase of multiple ownership transfers (AVOS being the disaster that ended it). This transition between multiple owners also meant the identity of the service was constantly under question, the focus of the service always being compared with other budding services. It is also important to note that this transition meant a steady stream of exits of users, some who self-hosted, some who transitioned to clones, some who started using paid services and many who relied on alternatives that were local storage (synced across devices, etc.). The death of the service and the rise of "likes" based model of links or site recommendation is an unsurprising co-occurrence. A simple act of bookmarking links of note for personal use had now morphed into a beastly game of one-upmanship and sale of personal data.

I've tried multiple services since the demise of del.icio.us, but am yet to find a viable alternative. I haven't been able to stick with each workflow for more than a couple of months. I have finally found an alternative that works for me now. I use Emacs (org-mode) with Firefox to store my bookmarks locally and then convert them to a simple YAML set that is then displayed on this site. The links are available on this link. And here's to hoping this lasts for a longer time!

This page will be updated once the new methods are checked.