Is Del.icio.us the rabbit for Yahoo!?
| January 31st, 2008Having worked with Yahoo! at two agencies across pretty much all of its products (including Search with Ged as a client!), I was a bit sad to hear about the job cuts in the pipeline and read some of the more cutting articles that appeared after the financial results. A lot of people have pointed to the fact that Yahoo! lacks any sort of vision and has yet to deliver a solid product roadmap that gets people all excited about its future again.
Now, I know that really recently Yahoo! revealed it is testing Del.icio.us results being incorporated into Yahoo! Search, but I’m still left with that nagging feeling that I’ve had for months that they are failing to make the most out of what is one of the most essential things on the web for me today - Del.icio.us. Now I didn’t get on board with Del.icio.us until 2006, March 18th to be precise - when I saved my first bookmark, a guide to free open source software on Open Source Mac. But, since then I’ve fed it like a beast and have saved over 2000 links to valuable, interesting stuff. If I lost all of those links I would be really rather unhappy indeed. In fact, I regularly back them up. Not that it would be the same but at least I’d have some record of all those amazing things I’ve found on the net.
Anyway, I’ve digressed a bit. My point is that even though I’d consider myself a fairly heavy user, I never really use any of the other features like saving links for other people or using the delicious network to find links from other people. Instead, I either stumble into someone’s bookmarks after they pop up in search results or go on a bit of a bookmark Safari after checking out someone’s blog that includes a link to their del.icio.us profile. I also think that the only person whose delicious master feed I get over RSS is Lynette Webb at Google (more on Lynette here). Surely that’s a bit odd - am I alone in this?
So the big question. Why doesn’t Yahoo! work more closely with Del.icio.us and integrate it FULLY into the Yahoo! Search experience? Surely, it’s sitting on a goldmine of filtered information - hand selected and saved information from human beings across the planet. Even just a custom simplified big search box start page (crude mock-up above!) that defaulted to searching the del.icio.us network and a better UI for the results would be a start. Just like we’ve learnt with Twitter, the Google homepage and countless other examples (very recently Instapaper too) - simple is best when it comes to the tools used to manage information. Sometimes it’s better to strip back features than serve everything up in one go.
Now that’s just one thing that could be done. There’s heaps of other stuff that I’m sure is possible. I just don’t see whay it’s taking Yahoo! so long. Remember - it was December 2005 that Yahoo! bought Del.icio.us - over 2 years ago. That’s ages in web-time, especially at a time when Yahoo! needs to pull a rabbit out the hat more than ever before.
Jonathan,
Yahoo! has had a two-tier offering in social bookmarking with Yahoo! Bookmarks aimed at the joe six-pack and del.icio.us aimed at the more digital literate consumer.
There are a number of factors that probably affect the considerations for integration:
- del.icio.us is only as good as its community, if this is mishandled OR feels its been mishandled it will disappear to magnolia stumbleupon etc
- integration is likely to complicate the brutally simple user experience
- Brand permission - one of the reasons that Google does so well in search is that it has so much more brand permission on search compared to its peers. This is as important as the quality of the offering. A great example of this is Lycos IQ - a fantastic well-engineered product that is superior to competitor offerings; but Lycos doesn’t have the brand permission from most people to do provide web services let known be considered a web innovator. Del.icio.us because of its early adopter and developer good vibes has that brand permission; the Yahoo! brand would have to build it all over again
Thanks for your insight Ged. I knew you’d definitely have something to say. Once people get del.icio.us (normally just me explaining it to them and them getting hands on and seeing the immediate benefits of it) they love it. So I guess there’s a chasm crossing thing to do for del.icio.us in explaining its benefits to people beyond the early adopter community. Del.icio.us is for everyone and I’m sure the community would agree this. If some more innovation took place that tapped into the valuable knowledge that exists already in the RIGHT way, then it would surely be good for everyone . . . . including Yahoo!? On the brand permission front I guess that’s a challenge for every one in the space wanting to cross that chasm.
My only question is, how many of those bookmarks have you actually gone to since you bookmarked them? I only have 150 (about 40 not shared) and forget about those. I can’t even fathom 2,000!
To your point though, the more we can incorporate del.icio.us, Stumble Upon or others, into search results the better. In theory, it makes more sense to rely on an actual person’s preferences rather than solely on a complicated algorithm. And having the option to do that all in one place would be quite beneficial.
Hello Melanie. The honest answer is that I go back to my bookmarks all the time - though some tags obviously get hammered more than others. I save stats, tools and other useful stuff that I call on very frequently. Other more off the wall stuff that usually involves something geeky or something related to a project looking at a certain thing I maybe don’t go back to as much. BUT - if I remember just one thing that I want to find again - I know I always can with a quick search. And that’s the beauty of it. Seriously, follow the del.icio.us regime and you’ll never look back.
THe point I was trying to get across - granted I rambled a bit - was that all of that human filtered data has to be immensely valuable, especially given the number of users and the amount of links sat in the del.icio.us data centre.
Since this the MSFT news has broke, so if it’s true and the deal goes ahead, I guess it becomes a MSFT thing. And that worries me a bit !
Very interesting thread.
I’m a heavy user of delicious because it genuinely adds daily value to my day - it helps me do my stuff. FULL STOP. So few web services truly offer me such value, and my team too.
What is interesting is, as you say, how Yahoo! failed to make the most of some excellent buys. Not just delicious, but upcoming (which needs more work, but could be gigantic) and another fave with the digerati, Flickr (a brand I genuinely *love*).
Ged’s view is that to ‘curate’ these brands well requires a light touch. That over-Yahooing would compromise, damage and cue exodus. I do agree.
But there’s something defeatist about that, so we need to think why didn’t Yahoo have permission to successfully integrate these communities. Why was it’s only option to not interfere?
- because it’s brand had lost its way with the digerati and meant nothing to them - the portal strategy and big entertainment company management chased eyeballs and scale at any cost
- because communities are defined by their edges - great marketing is discriminatory; clubs and teams are elitist or selective. To roll Flickr or delicious into an amorphous whole, that didn’t have brand equity, and didn’t offer additional value, and did feel like a dilution of an intimate community into a mass of users, would have led to afore-suggested exodus
I do also agree though Jonathan that you could have seamlessly integrated delicious results (niche) into mainstream Yahoo search results to benefit everyone without compromising anyone. Why didn’t they? It can’t be technological constraints: it can only be lack of strategic clarity. The peanut butter memo, and so on.
Thanks for your comment Will. It all changes since the Microhoo! news but I was thinking . . .
Dear del.icious community,
As you know we were bought by Yahoo! That’s allowed us to stay ad free, hire loads of incredibly smart people and develop del.icio.us into a true tool for the mainstream. We all know and love it, but as we’ve found by showing del.icio.us to our friends and family - once people get it they love del.icio.us and realise that it’s for them. They’ll never go back to using crappy bookmarks again.
So - as well as not being forced to run ads and having the funds to hire even more smart people, we’ve also developed shed loads of amazing new features - including a totally revamped, del.icio.us branded search engine that each and everyone of you has helped create. This we think is the future of search - the biggest searchable collection of web links assembled by a group of real human beings, not algorithms. We’ve developed even more ways of posting links - via mobile, SMS etc. We’ve integrated it with other services like Twitter - as well as across some bits of the Yahoo! network.
And - to make del.icio.us even bigger and better, we need to build our community. So, we’re going to be working closely with Yahoo! to tap into its network of users and introduce them slowly but surely to del.icio.us - to grow our collection of shared links into something even more useful and valuable. Kind of where Yahoo! started out in the first place right?!
Joshua and the team