Delicious (website)

Delicious

Company type	Private
Industry	Social bookmarking, Internet
Founded	2003
Founder	Joshua Schachter, Peter Gadjokov
Fate	Acquired by Pinboard and ceased bookmarking operations
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Joshua Schachter (founder)
Products	Social bookmarking service
Parent	Pinboard (from June 2017)

Delicious (presented as del.icio.us) was a web-based social bookmarking platform designed for saving, sharing, and discovering internet bookmarks. Established in 2003 by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov, the service was purchased by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, Delicious had amassed more than 5.3 million users and hosted approximately 180 million distinct bookmarked URLs. In April 2011, Yahoo transferred ownership to AVOS Systems, which subsequently relaunched the platform in beta form later that year. AVOS sold Delicious to Science Inc. in May 2014, and control shifted to Delicious Media in January 2016.

Pinboard acquired Delicious in June 2017 and later ceased its bookmarking operations.

Functionality

Delicious employed a flat classification system where users could freely assign index terms as tags to bookmarks, creating a collaborative categorization known as a folksonomy. This allowed users to view collections of bookmarks sharing the same tags, facilitating exploration of content added by others.

Users had the ability to organize related bookmarks into "Stacks," which included titles and descriptions, enabling collaboration, sharing, and following of these collections. Stacks were introduced in September 2011 but were discontinued by July 2012.

The platform featured pages like "hotlist" and "recent," showcasing popular content and viral trends. Users could also navigate stacks organized under categories such as Arts & Design or Education.

By default, bookmarks were publicly accessible; however, users could designate specific bookmarks as private. Imported bookmarks were private unless changed. The service prioritized public sharing over private bookmarking. Additionally, Delicious supported features such as linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and daily blog posts for integrating bookmarks into weblogs.

History

Delicious originated from Muxway, a link blog created by Joshua Schachter to curate links associated with Memepool. The initial version of Delicious launched in September 2003. By March 2005, Schachter committed full-time to developing the platform, which had secured roughly $2 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures and Amazon.com.

Delicious was among the first platforms to popularize "tags," enabling users to add personalized metadata to bookmarks for improved organization—an innovation initially seen as straightforward but practical.

On December 9, 2005, Yahoo acquired Delicious for an estimated amount between $15 million and $30 million; Schachter later revealed the final price was under $30 million.

In December 2010, an internal Yahoo presentation suggested plans to discontinue Delicious; however, Yahoo later clarified its intention was to sell rather than close the service. This uncertainty led many users to transition to alternatives like Pinboard (website), which experienced rapid growth. Other platforms such as Google Bookmarks and Spabba offered tools to facilitate migrating Delicious bookmarks.

On April 27, 2011, Avos Systems—founded by YouTube creators Chad Hurley and Steve Chen—purchased Delicious; Yahoo continued operating the site until September of that year.

The release of Delicious 3.0 on September 26, 2011 brought a significant redesign that removed or disabled numerous features, resulting in widespread dissatisfaction among users. Avos also shut down the support forum and moved user communications exclusively to email.

On November 9, 2011, Avos acquired Trunk.ly—a service that automatically saved links liked on social media—and introduced Twitter Connector for Delicious in March 2012.

Science Inc., a technology investment company, bought Delicious from Avos on May 8, 2014 without taking on staff and planned to keep the platform largely intact.

In January 2016, ownership transferred to a new entity formed through a partnership between Science Inc. and Domainersuite.

Pinboard took over Delicious on June 1, 2017; the service was made read-only on June 15 with users encouraged to migrate their data to Pinboard.

By July 15, 2020, Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard announced intentions to restore Delicious’s navigable features and provide data export options for authenticated users.

Under Avos Systems

Following its acquisition by AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011, Delicious experienced major user interface overhauls aimed at boosting its social interaction capabilities.

On September 26, 2011, Delicious introduced the beta release of version 3.0, featuring Stacks. This function enabled users to organize related bookmarks into personalized pages complete with titles, descriptions, and highlighted images.

By December 13, 2011, additional enhancements to the UI refined both the link-saving process and Stacks pages, adopting a layout reminiscent of the widely used social photo-sharing site Pinterest.

On January 20, 2012, social collaboration was further advanced as users gained the ability to jointly manage Stacks either publicly or within private groups. The platform also allowed commenting on and replying to Stacks, positioning Delicious as a rival to Pinterest, which at that time did not offer private boards.

On March 2, 2012, a Twitter Connector feature was added, enabling automatic import of links shared via tweets directly into users' Delicious accounts.

Nonetheless, by July 20, 2012, AVOS decided to discontinue the Stacks feature. All existing user-created Stacks were transformed into tags by early August without any loss of data. This decision aligned with AVOS’s strategic focus and addressed user concerns that Stacks too closely resembled Pinterest’s visual bookmarking style.

Name

The domain "del.icio.us" stood out as a creative example of a domain hack, cleverly combining characters to form a meaningful word. Schachter selected this name upon registering the domain when the .us registry became available, choosing suffixes that allowed for generating numerous words. The branding was inspired by a friend's analogy comparing discovering quality links to "eating cherries."

On September 6, 2007, Schachter announced the site's rebranding as "Delicious," accompanied by a redesign that officially launched on July 31, 2008. Plans to revert to the original "del.icio.us" branding were made in January 2016 and completed on April 24, 2016.

See also

• Web 2.0