WordCast: WordPress, Blogging, Social Media Guides and News

TechCrunch has just published fairly solid rumors confirmation that Yahoo is shutting down Del.icio.us:

For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that part of the Yahoo layoffs included shutting down the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has just tweeted out the above Yahoo! product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! is either closing or merging social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others.

The news comes with a slide showing the “Sunset” or services considered for closing or retiring and “Merge” services to mashup and combine. Under Sunset are listed Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, and Yahoo! Picks.

Alexia Tsotsis, the author, has contacted Yahoo for verification, but this move could impact bloggers around the world in many ways. For those dependent upon Delicious:

• Delicious Bookmark Research: If you have been a long time user of Delicious for research, bookmarking reference sites, you’ll have to either lose all those bookmarks or migrate them to another service.
• Delicious Link Posts: Many use the easy features of Delicious to save bookmarks during the week or a day and then automatically generate a link post on their blog. This will also end, which for many could be a good thing. Link posts are passé.
• Delicious Bookmark Feeds: Do you feature your Delicious bookmarks in feeds in your sidebar, highlighting references and resources for your readers. The reference and resource links are still of value, so bloggers will have to find ways of preserving them and sharing them through other resources or creating a Page on their site with a list of such references.
• Delicious as a Reference Resource: Many people, especially students and academics, rely upon Delicious as a resource to find reference material and dig into what others have found, like a reference search engine. Currently, there is nothing with such extensive features available to replace it, except for search engines.

For WordPress users, the EG-Delicious WordPress Plugin backups up Delicious bookmarks to the Links Panel in your WordPress blog. For those using WordPress Plugins to automatically generate link posts or post to Delicious, when Yahoo terminates Delicious, these will become defunct.

For those dependent upon Yahoo! Picks and Yahoo! Buzz, you’ll have to make changes to your blogs and bookmarks there accordingly.

For the many continuing to feature MyBlogLog in their sidebar, it might be time to consider a replacement or removing it. Many are replacing MyBlogLog with Facebook’s similar feature.

Losing AltaVista will be a sad day. Formerly one of the most powerful search engines, it was among the first to introduce fast translations through BabelFish. Founded in 1995, it became the exclusive search results provider for Yahoo! in 1996, then was sold and resold several times before taken over by Yahoo! in 2003, slowly losing its foothold against Google. While few will even notice its absence, long-time Internet users will mourn.

Exporting Delicious Bookmarks

With the future of Delicious uncertain, you may wish to preserve your Delicious bookmarks by exporting them. Learn how in WordCast’s Step-By-Step Guide to Exporting and Saving Delicious Bookmarks.

Other services similar to Delicious for preserving bookmarks include:

• BlinkList
• Username
• BookmarkTracker
• Clipmarks
• Faves
• linkaGoGo
• popacular
• Sphinn
• BibSonomy
• Diigo (formerly furl.net)
• Jumptags
• Mister Wong – Social Bookmarking Tool
• Pinboard (calls itself “antisocial bookmarking”)
• reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Google Bookmarks (built into Gmail and Google Accounts)

Updates:

“Kommons: Can you please open source Delicious?” calls for Yahoo to open up Delicious to the open source community, posting discussions that support that point of view.

“Delicious Shutting Down: How To Save Your Bookmarks — Tech Cocktail” offers more ways to export and protect your Delicious bookmarks, including using Backupify, Pinboard.in. Lifehacker also released instructions, the same as ours, for exporting your Delicious bookmarks.

Another bookmarking social site, ma.gnolia.com, formerly Gnolia, has also closed its doors.

A year ago on the last day of summer, I restarted Gnolia – then still Ma.gnolia. Since its relaunch, a very few of you have been using it, while most of you have understandably moved on…Thus, upon reflection, I’ve decided to close Gnolia back down and focus my resources on a couple of other projects that have greater potential and brighter futures.

Popular WordPress developers, @nacin and @andrewspittle, have announced on Twitter that they are working on a “slick Delicious WordPress Plugin” for release in the next few weeks. We’re awaiting details, but the odds are that the Plugin will add a bookmarking feature to WordPress so you can preserve your own bookmarks and share them on your site easily from within Sidebar Widgets to links within your blog posts and from within Bookmark Pages as resources.

As I predicted, there is a groundswell to save Delicious and the #SaveDelicious hashtag is making the rounds along with a @SaveDelicious Twitter account. Not sure how much momentum they can gain at this time of year, but it is worth the try.

There are growing fears, a long time coming, that other free sharing and networking sites closing. Many are concerned that YouTube and Flickr might be at risk along with many others. Currently, there are no public plans nor announcements about those sites. However, if you haven’t saved your images, videos, and other multimedia on independent backup services or personal drives, you might want to take time to do so.

Former Yahoo/Delicious exec Stephen Hood suggests that the Delicious social bookmarking service will not be sold, but archived and preserved.