Delicious

Delicious was a social bookmarking service that allowed users to save, tag, manage and share bookmarks from a centralized source. A significant aspect of the site was that, like many Web 2.0 sites, its tags were user-generated, non-hierarchical, and uncontrolled. Users created and applied their own tags in one step, and they could apply as many tags as they liked to each bookmark.
In the mid to late 00s, Delicious was probably the most popular social bookmarking service, both among fanfic fans and everyone else. However, Delicious's reign ended in September 2011 when the new company that had bought it relaunched the site with an unfinished redesign. Even after functionality was restored, the redesign made Delicious less useful to many of its former users.
In 2017, Delicious was bought by Pinboard.
==Fannish Migrations==
For many LiveJournal fans, Delicious represented a better solution to some existing link-hoarding practices, such as hand-coding lists of recs in LJ posts or using LJ's cumbersome Memory function. In general, the convenience of Delicious encouraged a shift from posting rec lists on fansites and blogs.
The site relaunch in September 2011 resulted in fanfic fandom migrating away from Delicious, initially to Diigo and Pinboard. However, the net result was an overall decrease in the importance of bookmarking as a public resource in fandom, even as some individual fans continued bookmarking either on Delicious or elsewhere. Possibly relevant is that the disastrous site change occurred during the same period that fans were migrating from LiveJournal to AO3 and Tumblr. AO3 has a bookmark function, and rec posts are popular on Tumblr.
==Fannish Uses of Delicious==
Fans who used Delicious used it to save fandom-related links or meta (in their own Delicious accounts) and locate recommendations for fannish reading material or find fanworks that might interest them (often using others' delicious accounts). Some fans maintained multiple accounts; others would throw fannish and non-fannish bookmarks into one account.
The following is a list of major fannish uses of the site:Note: This list describes fannish use before the September 2011 relaunch. Changes in interface and functionality following the relaunch may hinder or make impossible some of the items listed.
* Bookmarking favorite fanworks on their personal accounts.
* Creating and maintaining their own tags (hours of fun!), using either shared fannish vocabulary or their own system.
* Maintaining an easy-to-update rec list for self, friends, fandom at large, and/or specific communities and projects. Delicious is well suited for themed rec list.
** Keeping track of links for a fandom newsletter community.
** Providing a searchable archive for Kink Meme or comment fic fests prompts and fics.
* Sifting through a trusted reccer's delicious tags for fanworks to consume.
* Browsing or subscribing to site tags related to certain fandoms, pairings, genres, or other fannish keywords. The number of users who have bookmarked a given webpage displays prominently and can be an indication of its value; using the "popular" function in particular serves as an automatically generated rec list.
* Searching for your own name so you can see how many people have bookmarked your posts or stories and what they're saying about you.
* Searching for Fanworks on the Internet: Hunting down a particular fanwork you know exists but lost the link to—because some fans use many descriptive tags and notes in their bookmarks using delicious could be much faster than using a Fic Finding community or google—or searching for any fanworks that fit a particular theme.
* Finding updated URLs for fanworks that have disappeared from one location on the internet.
* Other searches?
Looking at tag clouds or search results also allowed statistics-minded fans to analyse fannish trends, as well as discover new content.
===Bookmarks===
Users could see their own bookmarks, their tags, notes and how many other people had bookmarked the same website. Tags could be collected in bundles which allowed a user to organize tags in groups such as "author" or "pairing".
Ironically, the official Delicious blog celebrated fandom's use of Delicious tag bundles in a 2013 post, two years after fandom had purportedly left Delicious. Bundle functionality had been lost after the relaunch and was recreated some time later. See Community Spotlight: Fandom!, Posted on June 17, 2013 by jessie.
The notes field was especially useful for fans using Delicious for rec lists or newsletters.
===Tagging===
Many fans named their tags to correspond to typical fanwork metadata such as author, fandom, rating, genre, character, pairing, and sometimes even length or status (complete or WIP) will be added to a bookmark. These naming conventions in turn made it easier for other fans to find fanworks by tag on Delicious. For example, a search for "fanfic" would bring up all recently bookmarked pages tagged with that term: http://delicious.com/tag/fanfic
Some users added punctuation or other characters, often just to sort their tags alphabetically. Because Delicious tags were until the September 2011 relaunch space-separated, rather than comma-separated, tags composed of phrases are also likely to contain underscores (_) or periods (.). Atypical tags were more difficult to search on, but that could be useful if the user was browsing only the reccer's account.
===Network===
Users could add other users to their "Network"—similar to a Friends List on LiveJournal. The network tab would then show all sites recently bookmarked by people from their network.
===Subscriptions===
The Network was a good way to find new content, but Subscriptions allowed a broader scope. A user could subscribe to a certain tag, such as "fanfiction", and would then see all recently bookmarked websites tagged with that term.
==Delicious Closure Scare==
A December 16, 2010, news report stating that Yahoo was going to shut down DeliciousIs Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? by Alexia Tsotsis. TechCrunch was widely linked by journaling fans, and mass fannish outcry occurred within hours.bluemeridian. Bloody HELL [aka @#%**! Delicious News], Dreamwidth post, 2010-12-16. (Accessed 17 December 2010). Various existing alternatives were discussed, and there was talk of creating a new fan-friendly version of Delicious, a la Dreamwidth. The possibility of switching to AO3's nascent bookmarking feature was also floated.
According to later reports, there was a possibility of Delicious being sold instead of shut down. 
Many fans, and other non-fannish users, began migrating to other sites such as Pinboard and Diigo or using them as backups for their bookmarks.Anatomy of a Crushing Pinboard official blog post which includes site traffic stats for the days after the closure announcement. (Accessed September 30, 2011)
==Delicious Sale and Renewed Opt-In Policy==
On 27 April 2011, the acquisition of delicious by AVOS (an internet company founded by the founders of YouTube) was announced.YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo! "Promise Users the Same Great Service And Even Easier & More Fun Ways To Save, Share, and Discover the Web's "Tastiest" Content." -- press release at AVOS.com website, 27 April 2011. (Accessed 17 May 2011) At that time, the transfer of content was expected to happen around July 2011,The answers to frequently asked questions about the AVOS transition help page at delicious.com (Accessed 17 May 2011) but the new site was not launched until September 27, 2011.
Fannish users quickly started discussing the active opt-in policy and ToS, and ideas for archiving old delicious accounts that might become inaccessible once the sale and transfer were completed, as well as continuing to urge making backups of delicious bookmarks elsewhere.archiving links post by catechism at deliciouslymad LJ community, 28 April 2011. (Accessed 17 May 2011)More Del.icio.us talk post by anatsuno urging users to log in to delicious and opt in to the new ToS so their bookmarks remain accessible, 1 May 2011. (Accessed 17 May 2011)
===AVOS Launches New Delicious===
When the new Delicious was launched on September 27, 2011, it was met with an intensely negative response.oh my god (Accessed Sept. 27, 2011)thread at Fail-Fandomanon (Accessed Sept. 27, 2011) Immediately, many fans started accounts on other social bookmarking services (notably Diigo and Pinboard), people started posting and linking meta,special edition of /report by rageprufrock and mklutz.lian. quick'n'dirty delicious linkspam and one fan set up a google spreadsheet for people to self-report their user names on alternate services.the great delicious migration
One Tumblr user addressed TPTB at Delicious:
An interview with Delicious' new owner suggested that AVOS' vision of the site does not—and will not—mesh with fandom's needs. As fan runpunkrun said: "Our new digital overlord, Chad Hurley, gave an interview in which he complained about how things just got so hard when people were using Delicious to save links and tags and information. So he put a stop to it." Batman hates it when Web 2.0 gets in the way of his bookmarking. (Accessed Oct. 11, 2011)
The offending Q&A: 
The initial version of AVOS Delicious did not include tag bundles. Many kink meme, comment fic sites and newsletter communities relied on the bundles to organize the tags for creating or organizing their content. Some communities immediately switched to other sites, even though they did not offer the tag bundle feature either, often because other features or functionality was missing.
Many newsletters that used Delicious to collate their links were forced to hand-code or partially hand-code their posts, putting pressure on fans who had been relying on automation to make a labour intensive job easy enough to be handled by a few volunteers. The Delicious RSS feeds were non-functional for several days, and even though AVOS announced they were still supporting the old APIs, many scripts did not work after the re-launch. Some newsletter communities switched immediately to Pinboard since its API is very similar to the old Delicious one.Pinboard How To (API) (Accessed September 30, 2011)
Fannish interest in general focused on Diigo and Pinboard as alternatives. The quick and positive interest by the Pinboard owner, Maciej Ceglowski, in fannish users led to the creation of a collaborative GoogleDoc spec request for features he could implement to make Pinboard more attractive to fans.Pinboard feature request - wishlist! (Accessed September 30, 2011) The result was a document he described in a Tweet: "Watching that epic Google doc grow a table of contents. Soon it will acquire robotic exoskeleton and begin roaming the earth."Tweet from Pinboard official twitter on September 29, 2011. (Accessed September 30, 2011)
The inevitable result of the Twitter conversations, and some comments in the GoogleDoc itself, was some Anthropomorfic.
* The Morning After by ambyr pairs Fandom/Pinboard and leaves Delicious out in the cold with Diigo.
* When Bookmarks Were In Mustache Land by Jedusaur paraphrases the fannish reaction to the Delicious relaunch in play form, and discusses Pinboard's reaction to the fannish migration.
==End of the Site==
Delicious' (and fandom's) intertwined history with Pinboard came to a conclusion in June 2017 when the site, after several more ownership changes, was bought out by Pinboard for a mere $35,000.It’s the end of an era, as Pinboard buys and shutters del.icio.us, thenextweb.com, 1 June 2017. (Accessed June 3, 2017) The initial plan for the site is for it to remain accessible online but closed to new content, with account holders able to migrate their content to Pinboard.Pinboard acquires Delicious, Pinboard Blog, June 01, 2017
==Examples of Fandom-Related Delicious Accounts==
* Rec Room (Fanfic Recs)
* Fandom Directory (Directory for Livejournal users with fannish Delicious accounts)
* List Links (Recs and Thematic Lists)
* Metafandom (Metafandom's Links)
* SGA_newsletter (SGA Newsletter's links)
* Ultimateficarchiver (Massive listing of fanfiction, tagged by fandom, pairing, genre and author)
==Meta Commentary==
* Why [], :, !, and . have no place in your delicious bookmarks by cimorene, October 27, 2009. Post that talks about the social aspects of tagging.
* July 2006 poll by Sandy Herrold
* Numbers, I love (horribly inexact) numbers! by Sandy Herrold, April 1, 2010.
* wistfuljane's 2008 post on RPF classification
* finding your flock by catechism, May 19, 2009. Includes discussion of how to make friends on Delicious
* Agatha S. Donkar. "I'm In Ur Bookmarks, Stealin' Ur Tags!: Closed Communities and Their Influence On Consistent Vocabularies In User Developed Folksonomies." April 2007. (Master's thesis)
* 2015-08-19, 2015-08-29 (some 2015 Fail_Fandomanon discussions included accounts of anons' post-delicious bookmarking adventures)
* by murklins (April 27, 2011)
* by catechism (April 28, 2011)
* by anatsuo (May 1, 2011)
===Post-relaunch Reactions, September 2011===
* Geekery and Randomness, Links, Delicious - discussion and link roundup by somnolentblue on Dreamwidth
* Delicious v/s Diigo v/s Pinboard - by bookshop on LiveJournal
* AVOS!Delicious: The Good, The Bad & The Future - by kronos999 on LiveJournal
* untitled reblog by Minimoonstar on Tumblr
* del linkspam on deliciouslymad (LJ community)
==Other Resources==
* Using del.icio.us a detailed tutorial for fannish delicious use by Arduinna from 2007
==References==
Category:Fanwork Sharing
Category:Social Networking
Category:Websites
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