Delicious.com Has Just Crawled Out of The Pet Cemetery

Remember the Stephen King novel and film, Pet Cemetery? Basically there’s this mysterious pet cemetery way out in the woods–I think it’s an ancient indian burial ground or some shit. Basically, if you bury the dead in the pet cemetery it will come back to life, crawl out of the ground, and return home. Unfortunately, as you would expect, after the thing you buried is resurrected, it returns as a lesser (usually evil) form of itself. And the longer you wait to bury the corpse in the pet cemetery, the more demented it becomes.

In December of 2010 the social bookmarking website Delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us) died. It’s owner, Yahoo!, decided to pull the plug–upsetting it’s most dedicated and vocal user base (including yours truly). Then–in the midst of our mourning, as we scrambled to find a replacement and export thousands of bookmarks–a hopeful message came from the Delicious blog:

“No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.”

Resurrection! My 3400+ bookmarks (all properly tagged and organized as any anal retentive IA type would) were safe and sound. A company called AVOS, founded by the guys who started YouTube, had brought Delicious back from the dead! Unfortunately, I’d forgotten the valuable life lessons taught to me by Stephen King:

1. Clowns are scary as hell.
2. Never agree to be the winter caretaker at the Stanley Hotel.
3. Nothing good ever comes back from the dead. Nothing.

The AVOS team spent several months working hard to get Delicious ready for its debut. Then, on September 26, 2011, the “new and improved” Delicious was revealed! Only, it wasn’t quite the same. It looked kind of like Delicious. There was talk of a new feature–something about “stacks,” and some kind of drawing of a bunny or cat or something on my profile page. But the things that I loved about Delicious were gone. The data portability/RSS feeds that I used to monitor trends via the Delicious Popular list and the feed I used to populate my blog were missing. Chrome extension: broken. Mobile site: nuked. Type ahead for tagging content: gone. The ability to group tags; my network… nowhere to be found. And the AVOS team is unusually quiet (no commenting allowed on the AVOS blog, and comments go into a moderation black hole on the old Delicious blog).

I’m curious… Did the people responsible for rebuilding the new version of the website bother to speak to its most dedicated users? I’m guessing no. I’m certainly not the only one who feels as though key features are missing. It’s disappointing to see that something I’ve relied on for several years has taken such a wrong turn, but like I learned from Stephen King, “Sometimes dead is better.”

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