2013 by the Philip Lief Group. On June 1, 2017, Delicious was acquired by Pinboard, and delicious memes bookmarking service was discontinued in favor of Pinboard’s paid subscription-based service.
Delicious also allowed users to group links with similar topics together to form a “Stack”, and include title and descriptions for the Stack page. Stacks could be worked on collaboratively with other users, and could be followed and shared with other users. Stacks were added in September 2011 and removed in July 2012. Delicious had a “hotlist” on its home page and “recent” pages, which helped to make the website a conveyor of Internet memes and trends. Delicious was one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Use of Delicious was free and a user could download his or her own data through the site’s API in an XML or JSON format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format. All bookmarks posted to Delicious were publicly viewable by default, although users could mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks were private by default.
The precursor to Delicious was Muxway, a link blog that had grown out of a text file that Schachter maintained to keep track of links related to Memepool. In September 2003, Schachter released the first version of Delicious. When Delicious was first launched, it was the first use of the term “tag” in the modern sense, and it was the first explicit opportunity where website users were given the ability to add their own tags to their bookmarks so that they could more easily search for them at a later time. Yahoo acquired Delicious on December 9, 2005. On December 16, 2010, an internal slide from a Yahoo meeting leaked, indicating that Delicious would be “sunsetted” in the future, which seemed to mean “shut down”. Later Yahoo clarified that they would be selling Delicious, not ending it.
This news resulted in Delicious users looking for alternative sites. On April 27, 2011, Delicious announced the site was sold to Avos Systems, a company created by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Unbeknownst to members, Yahoo continued to operate the site until September 2011. On September 26, 2011, Delicious launched its completely new version 3. This redesign came in as a surprise to many of its users, with many features being disabled, removed or temporarily unavailable.
On November 9, 2011, AVOS Systems announced that they had acquired the link-saving service, Trunk. On May 8, 2014, Science, Inc. Delicious website from AVOS, without acquiring staff. On January 11, 2016, the Delicious blog announced ownership had transitioned to a new company formed between Science and of Domainersuite. On June 1, 2017, Pinboard acquired Delicious.
The service was shut down and became read-only on June 15, and its users have been encouraged to subscribe to the Pinboard service. As of July 15, 2020 Maciej Ceglowski has announced ownership of del. He has plans to restore the site and allow data import etc. After being purchased by AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011, Delicious went through significant UI redesigns and became more social. Delicious added a new feature called Stacks that allows users to group multiple related links into a single page, and customize the Stack by adding title, description and a featured image. On December 13, 2011, Delicious continued its work to redesign its site, including UI changes to link-saving page and Stacks page. The new design, especially for the Stacks page, was similar to the design of another popular social photo-sharing website Pinterest.
On January 20, 2012, Delicious added more social features into its Stacks page, allowing users to collaborate on the same Stack, as a public Stack or a private Stack among a group of users. The users can also comment on a stack and create a stack as a response to the original stack. On March 2, 2012, Delicious continued its effort to be more social, by providing a Twitter Connector that allows users to connect their Twitter accounts to their Delicious accounts. This new feature allowed tweeted links to be automatically saved into the Delicious account. On July 20, 2012, Delicious reversed its position on the Stacks feature. All Stacks created by members were converted to tags in early August, 2012, without any loss of member data. This was part in response to AVOS’s direction for Delicious and partly from feedback from Delicious members, many of whom felt that Stacks were trying to emulate features of the visual bookmarking site, Pinterest.