Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

– 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.

Obviously this is good news. Perhaps we will see something along the lines of Skype’s buyback happen, where the service’s original founders bought the company back from eBay for less than they sold it for. So long as Kevin Rose doesn’t buy it, Delicious should probably be all right. (But I would still recommend backing up your bookmarks, just to be safe.)

Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us back in 2005, and has done little with it. They haven’t run ads on the site or really made any apparent effort to monetize the service. And instead of, I don’t know, selling the service to someone who could make it profitable, they decide to just shut it all down. (Let’s not forget that a meticulously-tagged index of links and their popularity is a wonderful mine of data that advertisers and publishers would love to be able to get metrics from.)

Suffice to say, I am majorly unhappy about this. I have been a Del.icio.us user for years, and have over 2,500 tagged bookmarks stored in the service. Yahoo is suddenly yanking the rug out from under users who have been depending on the service for years. We would gladly put up with ads, or maybe even premium plans. But no, Yahoo is just saying “screw you” to everyone.

Yahoo is dead to me. One by one they are closing the few services that are worth anything. (I assume Flickr and the wonderful BOSS Search API can’t be too far behind?) The services that they are keeping around are things like their vapid content offerings and underwhelming webmail application. They are still stuck in the ’90s, and they are blatantly disregarding the assets that are their most valuable.

Anyway, be sure to export your Delicious bookmarks as soon as possible so you don’t lose them when the site closes. Find an alternative service or simply import them into your web browser’s bookmarking tool.

Update: Yahoo has announced that they will not be shutting Delicious down after all.

The new Digg Version 4 changes all of that, and turns the site into a place that’s actually pleasant to use. You get a customized Twitter-style feed of the profiles you “follow,” which is sorted by the number of votes the articles receive. I had been beta testing the site for awhile, but it’s live for everyone now.

The content is better, since you have more control over what you see. And most of the posts I end up seeing have zero comments, which is also nice.

It’s easier to post new links than before, with a streamlined URL box that lets you breeze right through the process.

For us content producers, there’s a neat new feature that will take an RSS feed or two and automatically Digg anything published in it. So you can take your blogs’ feeds and have their posts automatically submitted to your profile. So you can automate the posting of your own stuff, freeing you up to submit content you find elsewhere.

Also, when you post a link to Digg it gives you an option to cross-post it to Twitter and Facebook.

I like the new Digg. I just might start using it again, now that I don’t have to put up with a bunch of foul-mouthed, Apple-bashing 13-year-olds. Just remember, don’t click the “Top News” tab to the right of the default “My News.” You will end up on a page similar to the old Digg.

If you want to give the new Digg a try, you can follow me here.

In the post announcing the change, the fourth iteration of the site, they say that their goals are to make things simpler, searchable, and more social. The search has been improved, and now lets you chose to search within your favorites, everyone’s, or your friends’.

It all looks significantly different. The “simpler” part of their mission has certainly been realized. It’s easy to navigate, and there certainly aren’t any unnecessary elements cluttering things up.

The search, too, works as advertised. It’s good at digging-up what you’re looking for, and seems to be heavily weighted towards views/votes.

It will be interesting to see if this drives more people to the main StumbleUpon site instead of just clicking away at their toolbars. I wonder if the iframe toolbar and Su.pr are also partially attempts at doing just that?

Yet another shortener has sprung up, and this one is a bit different.

BurnURL is an URL shortener with a moderately-short domain, a Web 2.0-ish design, and some unique features. Shortened URLs are displayed in a frameset with a small blue bar along the top with icons to share the link on various social bookmarking/networking services. It also tracks hits, and has a vote-up/vote-down rating.

An interesting idea. It certainly promises to bring some extra traffic in. You don’t have to worry about having StumbleUpon, Digg, or Delicious pointing to BurnURL addresses either. The icons use your actual pag URL instead, except for the “Share on Twitter” button, which uses the BurnURL to save on space.

Though I usually have an aversion to frameset toolbars, I kind of like BurnURL. The top bar fits in well with usual uses for URL shortening, and promotes the sharing of the pages.

BurnURL for this page: http://burnurl.com/2gAh72.

There are quite a few JavaScript solutions out there to make it easy to share posts, such as the popular ShareThis. However, I found another one fairly recently. iBegin Share is a stylish JavaScript widget that appears as a blue (or other color) “Share” button that, when clicked, opens a dropdown with neat and large icons for social bookmarking sites. Also, there are optional tabs for sharing via email, saving as a PDF, or printing. It looks something like this:

I like the big icons. The size makes it easier to find the icon you’re looking for, rather than wade through a list of tiny favicon-sized images.

iBegin Share is available in both a standalone version, and as a WordPress plugin.

On Tuesday night StumbleUpon is changing the way users interact with the service, ditching the need for a software-based browser toolbar in place of a small frame that loads on top of the Web site you’re on. Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience, but the idea is that anyone can begin stumbling without having to install anything.

To get the Web toolbar to show up in the first place, users must now begin their stumbling experience from the StumbleUpon home page. The site is now broken up into categories. Once you’ve clicked on a link the experience begins, with the persistent toolbar following you from site to site and keeping track of your ratings to provide you with new stumbles.

You can read the full article over at CNET: StumbleUpon 2.0: Good-bye, software toolbar.

I have a few concerns about this…

• While they say “Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience,” can they assure us that they will never drop toolbar support? It’s what makes the service unique, and a frame-based page (frames, really? This is 2008!) can’t even hope to be as functional. And the toolbar should not be de-emphasized in any way.
• What about pages with JavaScript designed to nuke frames? Plenty of sites detect when they’re being loaded in a frameset and bust out of it. This is really the first thought that popped into my mind after I realized they weren’t killing the toolbar (which just wouldn’t make sense for them to do, really).

To me it seems like they’re trying to a) drive more traffic to StumbleUpon.com, probably so they can better monetize the service, and b) help out the publishers a bit by spreading the stumbles around more.

I think that their changes will really improve the service, and get more people Stumblin’.

I think it’s an improvement, and a well-executed one. I don’t forsee an uproar over the design change, as happens often with design changes, seeing as they kept their overall look, and improved upon it, rather than adding a bunch of shiny plastic and “BETA” tags.

What do you think of the new design? I like it personally, though I’m not in the habit of using the site on a regular basis. (I prefer to use the Firefox extension day-to-day.)

I don’t get it.

Sure, the site is new and shiny. But they have nothing on Digg so far.

• Users of Yahoo Buzz can only vote on stories, they cannot submit them.
• Only select sites can have their articles featured (read: really big blogs). Yahoo says they are in beta, and are currently not accepting publisher applications.
• I doubt Yahoo will ever let smaller sites be featured. They’ll most likely keep it weighted towards the bigger sites, with some lame excuse like “all the traffic would kill your site!”

I admit that the potential traffic from Yahoo Buzz is great. As Daily Blog Tips pointed out:

TechCrunch recently published a post revealing the initial traffic details of Yahoo! Buzz. Salon.com reported over one million visitors to a story that was featured on the front page of Buzz. Confirming that number The Huffington Post claimed that they received around 800,000 visitors from the site as well.

My shared hosting definitely wouldn’t stand-up to traffic like that (heck, even Ars Technica has been running slower lately, no doubt from being in the Yahoo Buzz program). But I think most bloggers would agree that they would want the traffic anyway. Hosting issues can be taken care of, and isn’t it a well-known fact that the average Yahoo user is more likely to click ads than most web users?

Besides, by cutting-out smaller blogs, and by using a closed system requiring publishers to be approved before their stories can be submitted (which I have no doubt they will continue using), Yahoo Buzz will never be a true competitor to Digg. The best part of Digg is that any old blog can make it to the front page. If someone has good content that the users will respond to, the article can make it to the front page, uninhibited by restrictions set by the site.

Here’s my idea of how it should work…

If Yahoo is so worried about bringing down people’s shared hosting accounts, they should keep their opt-in publishing scheme, but not have an approval process. In order to have the possibility of having your stories featured, you should have to apply. That way you can’t complain if your server goes down, and anyone would be able to have their article submitted.

Don’t just Stumble. Submit pages, review them, tag them. Do more than just channel-surf, contribute to the community.

Submitting

Keep the StumbleUpon toolbar ready when you browse the web normally. Find something you like? Click the Thumbs-up button, like you do when you’re using the Stumble button. If someone else already submitted the page, it will just fade to gray when you click it, and that’s all. You’ve added another vote to the page. If you’re the first to discover the page, a new window will open with a form to fill-out.

Clean-up the Title field, if it’s full of extraneous rubbish. You just want the post/page title here, not the site’s name, or anything. Next, write a couple sentences about the page in the Review box. While you can get away with leaving the Review field blank, I highly recommend filling it out. Select the most appropriate topic, and hit the Submit This Site button.

Reviewing

If you go to yourusername.stumbleupon.com, you will be presented with your StumbleUpon blog (or StumbleBlog as I call it). Every review you leave will be shown here, along with a link to the page you reviewed. This means your friends can see what you like online, and it makes it easy for you to find things you Liked in the past.

How do you leave a review? If you’re submitting a site, then there’s a prominent Review field ready, but what if you’re just another up-voter? The toolbar has a word-bubble-shaped icon that, when clicked, takes you to a page that lists all the review of a page. In addition to seeing what others said about the page, you can leave your own review. Get in the habit of reviewing pages you and may want to come back to, or you think others may be interested in.

Tagging

The toolbar has yet another icon, shaped like a price tag. By clicking this, you can add a few tags to a page.

Tags define a page, making it possible to do neat tricks, like only Stumbling pages with a certain tag.

You don’t need to go crazy, tagging every page in sight, but this is yet another thing that may help you, or someone else, find the page again.

Channels

StumbleUpon is often compared to idly flipping through channels on a television. If you use StumbleUpon’s Channels feature, it’s more like flipping through a years worth of shows on a single TV channel.

Make sure either Channels, or the tidier Channels Menu, is turned-on in your Toolbar Options. By selecting a channel, you can Stumble through pages that are only from The Onion, only from Wikipedia, only from YouTube, only in the Internet Tools topic, etc.

Send To

Pretty much web user has, at some point or another, emailed a link to someone they know. It’s a bit fo a hassle, though. You have to copy the URL, trek over to your email client, start a new message, paste the URL in, and write a short note to explain why you’re sending the link.

StumbleUpon can help you here. By enabling the Send Top feature in the Options window, you can easily share pages via a convenient menu. Your StumbleUpon friends are automatically in the list, and you can send to any email you want. Your friend will receive an email from StumbleUpon containing your username and the link (as well as a big “Pass it on button”).

StumbleUpon has a lot of features that are overlooked by many users. Check-out all the buttons on the toolbar, and poke around in the Toolbar Options screen. See what SU has to offer.