I’m watching the sale of Delicious with some interest. Here’s the history of social bookmarking:
- 1997 or earlier?: an unknown hero thought of the idea probably (date is a guess)
- June 1999: I asked a couple of programmers at ArsDigita to develop a module for our free open-source online community toolkit, the software behind the photo.net Web site. The documentation is available at http://philip.greenspun.com/doc/bookmarks (it is conceivable that this was the first time anyone had built such a system, but seems doubtful). At this point the technical problem was solved. Anyone could download the software and have user registration and social bookmarking up and running within a few hours.
- September 2003: Delicious founded (source)
- December 2005: Delicious sold to Yahoo for an estimated $15-30 million.
- April 2011: Delicious more or less given away to a couple of rich guys? (WSJ)
I.e., the idea and implementation went from economically worthless (1999) to very valuable (2005) to nearly worthless again (today).
The idea and implementation were almost worthless through the whole cycle. Delicious’s name awareness and userbase was briefly valuable.
Soccer moms and grandpas have facebook. I suppose they don’t want to be confused with a host of niche tools like delicious.
Tagging/keywording? is certainly not new.
Personally I use “tag” & “keyword” as synonyms.
In 1990 I stumbled into a Macintosh contact management product that used tags. VERY powerful. I think the product came to market in maybe 1985 or so… built by an MIT wizard, Dash Chang.
How he squeezed all that functionality into a ***tiny*** software executable was pure genius. The product was F-A-S-T… on seriously whimpy hardware.
As wonderful as tags are they have drawbacks. My tag collection eventually grew to 800. Far too big. No facility to manage redundancy.
Also (please point me in right direction if I’ve not found this yet), the implicit assumption is that when I tag something the tag means the same thing to me as to you. Obviously an unsustainable assumption.
I loved delicious until Yahoo bought them. That was the beginning of the end. They are notorious for mismanaging their acquisitions.