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Del.icio.us was a social bookmarking service: people saved web pages, tagged them in their own words and could use other people’s public bookmarks to discover useful links. It began as a solution to one person’s problem—how to keep track of more links than ordinary browser bookmarks could manage—and grew into a shared index of the web. Today, the site describes itself as a read-only archive, not an active bookmarking service.

What is del.icio.us?

Del.icio.us (later commonly styled Delicious) was a web-based tool for saving and organizing links. Founder Joshua Schachter described it as “a system for saving things you have seen on the internet, and sharing them with other people.” The Guardian’s 2006 interview with Schachter explains both sides of the idea: keeping links for yourself and making saved links useful to others.

Schachter built it to address a practical problem. As Computerworld reported in November 2005, his collection had grown beyond what he could conveniently organize and retrieve as ordinary browser bookmarks. The service put the collection on the web and let him label links with tags.

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What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is saving web links in a way that can connect an individual’s collection to other people’s collections. A tag is a user-created label—such as a subject or topic—attached to a saved page. Unlike a folder hierarchy that only reflects one person’s filing choices, tags can overlap, and shared bookmarks let people see how others labeled and collected pages.

Personal memory and retrieval

A del.icio.us user could save a page and add tags that made sense to them, then return to it later from the web. The tags were a flexible retrieval aid for a growing personal collection, rather than a fixed set of categories imposed by the service.

Discovery through other people’s links

When bookmarks were public or shared, the same tags and saved pages became a discovery layer. A reader could find pages through what other users had saved and the labels they had applied. In its 2006 interview, The Guardian presented this as a way to benefit from other people’s filing work: the service was useful not only for remembering a link, but also for finding links collected by a community.

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Why did del.icio.us attract attention?

Its distinctive idea was to make personal link-saving more useful by connecting it to a collectively navigable set of tags and bookmarks. People could organize their own links while also learning from how others grouped and saved pages. That combination helps explain the contemporary description of del.icio.us as a social bookmarking phenomenon: the service turned many individual lists into a potential discovery resource.

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In December 2005, Yahoo announced it had acquired del.icio.us. Wired’s December 2005 report said the service had more than 300,000 users at the time, attributing the figure to Schachter. That is a contemporaneous report around the acquisition, not a current user count or a verified lifetime peak.

What happened to Delicious?

Del.icio.us passed through major changes after Yahoo acquired it, but the available account does not establish every step in its later ownership history. The current archive owner, Maciej Ceglowski, says he bought what remained of the site in 2017. He also says Yahoo sold it to AVOS in 2010 and warns that the transfer of user data required users to opt in. The site’s current about and help page identifies the service as a read-only archive and a “museum of links past.”

There was uncertainty about the service’s future before its present archive state. In December 2010, TechCrunch reported that Yahoo appeared to be considering a sunset or merger. That was reporting about a proposed decision at the time; it should not be confused with the current site, which remains accessible as a read-only archive.

Do you have my data?

The archive says people can log in and use its export link to retrieve data that is available in their account. However, the site warns that some very old accounts may not have transferred when the 2010 move to AVOS required an opt-in. The archive page also says account deletion and password recovery are not supported in its described read-only state. These are operational details stated by the site and may change.

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Is del.icio.us coming back?

The site presents itself as a read-only archive, so there is no basis to treat it as a returning, active bookmarking product. If you want a service for saving new bookmarks in the style of classic del.icio.us, the archive owner points to Pinboard, which he describes as a paid clone. That is a pointer to an alternative, not evidence of an affiliation between the services.

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