I have been a fan of social bookmarking ever since I discovered Del.icio.us in 2005. No more huge nested drop-down lists in my browser! No more wanting a bookmark on my work computer when I was at home! I jumped into the service, even though there were a few interface issues that kinda bugged me. It was so worth it for the convenience.
In 2006 the uber-web elite that I followed (Jeffrey Zeldman and the like) began trumpting the virtues of a new online bookmark service called Ma.gnolia. It had similar features to Delicious, but the interface was much more refined and visually appealing. I happily exported my bookmarks out of Delicious and switched.
Everything was great with Magnolia until Jan. 31, 2009 – the day the Magnolia server crashed. The site backup apparently corrupted as well. Total. Data. Loss. It turns out what I thought was a professional-level service was run by just one guy. Some users were able to recover their bookmarks if they had been accessing them through RSS feeds before the crash, but I hadn’t been doing that so I lost them all.
I was so pissed!! I come across so many more web design-related sites in a day than I could possibly read (and still get anything done) so I bookmark heavily to build up a reference base for the future. I depend on them for work. I couldn’t believe I lost 3 years of links!
Luckily I never closed my account at Delicious and was pleasantly surprised to find out that they had upgraded their interface since the last time I had used it. I picked back up where I had left off and was a satisfied Delicious user with their new site design. Delicious was owned by Yahoo, so surely it was a much better supported site that would stick around, right?
Wrong. About a month ago someone from within Yahoo leaked an internal presentation slide that indicated they were going to drop the Delicious service. I couldn’t believe I was about to get burned again. Yahoo has now backpeddled a bit and said that they are going to try to sell the service off to another company and that it wasn’t going to be shut down. Amid the protests people began posting lists of alternative services to use – Google Bookmarks, Pinboard, Diigo, etc. Sure. How long would any of them last?
I’m grateful that nothing happened to Delicious before l was able to export my bookmarks…..but I am SO done. There are lots of other free sites/services out there that I could live without, but not my bookmarks. I’ve decided they are way too important to leave to the whims of a free service. I began searching for open source bookmarking software I could host myself so I would remain in control of them. Good thing I found one: SemanticScuttle. Time to take matters into my own hands!