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Delicious is about to lose a bunch of users

Written on 29th July 2008 14 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

For months now Delicious has promised to launch their new website with some updated features, a brand new design and improved security. Another big change will be the new domain name. Although it has been active for a while now the main domain was still http://del.icio.us once they will switch to the new design the official domain name will be http://delicious.com.

Interestingly enough the switch will not go unnoticed by most users. As Delicious writes on its blog:

After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven. When we release it, you’ll be automatically logged out of your account and will have to log in again, due to some changes we’re making behind the scenes.

They have some helpful instructions for people who are currently logged in but might not know what their password is and for people who might not remember which emailaddress they used to register for Delicious. If you have an account there and plan to use it after the switch I recommend reading that blogpost now and following the instructions to make sure you can still login later.

My guess is that a large part of its users won’t return after the switch and will turn out to be ’sleeping’ users. But since Delicious doesn’t openly disclose its traffic and numbers we won’t ever know what the real effect will be of their update.

14 Comments »

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com & this Blog. Boris is also very active on Twitter: @Boris

14 comments/trackbacks to “Delicious is about to lose a bunch of users”

Jul 30, 2008: Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » final July ‘08 blogging
[...] Delicious is about to lose a bunch of users [...]
Jul 31, 2008: The New Delicious! (Forgot password? Get lost!)
[...] earlier I predicted that a lot of users wouldn’t be able to log in again after being logged our by Del.icio.us [...]

By Jamie Riddell on Jul 29, 2008

OK, it may lose the sleepers, which may not be a bad thing. But with the new url, could it potentially get a ton more users? Even as a daily Delicious user, I can’t remember the URL which must be a barrier to entry.

When Yahoo gets around to actually integrating Delicious to main Yahoo it should see a substantial boost. If you note on all Yahoo stories, there is no option to add the story to Delicious, which is just daft.

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By Matt S. on July 30th, 2008:
I’m sure the old URL will redirect to the new URL…. what is the big deal? Just make sure you have your username and password known…. and if you don’t know that, then you best not be using online applications, because you need to be good a remembering username and passwords for all the different things available. You won’t need a username or password to watch videos at http://tvharddrive.com/ though…that’s cool!

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jul 29, 2008

Yes Jamie that is just incredible. Why bother to acquire a service and then just ignore them?

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By Patrick de Laive on Jul 29, 2008

When del.cio.us took off in 2004 nobody dared to enter the social bookmarking sphere.
I don’t get it why social bookmarking didn’t go mainstream and I expect it will be sooner or later. Delicious will take its chunk of the market, but I expect other services to take their fair share as well.

It’s gonna be an interesting time in the social bookmarking sector

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on July 29th, 2008:
There are a few comments about this on hackernews too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260274

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By Patrick de Laive on July 29th, 2008:
Thanks for mentioning boris

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By Joop Dorresteijn on Jul 29, 2008

They already lost me a long time ago…

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By Patrick de Laive on Jul 29, 2008

me too

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By Ian on Jul 29, 2008

I still use del.icio.us, but mostly because I find it useful and less because I want to play with some sort of masturbatory toy on the internet. I wonder which group of users will be best served by the changes?

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By Britta on July 29th, 2008:
Delicious has both kinds of user in mind. :) http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/ puts it really nicely.

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By Stellaris on Jul 30, 2008

Looking forward to the new delicious.

sent from: fav.or.it [FID897602]

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By John McElhenney on Jul 31, 2008

So back up your OPML and get over it. I am sorry to see Delicious upgrade anything. That’s part of why I have not migrated to Magnolia or others. I like the text only deli. It’s fast, it’s ad-free. Perhaps they can let you (set prefs for the OLD STYLE deli!) That would be cool.

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