User:Cht12/Sandbox/Delicious

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

The site was re-sold to AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011 and relaunched in a "back to beta" state on 27 September that year.

Site description
Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL http://delicious.com/tag/wiki displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by other users.

Delicious also allows users to group links with similar topics together to form a "Stack", and include title and descriptions for the Stack page. Stacks can be worked on collaboratively with other users, and can be followed and shared to other users.

Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of Internet memes and trends. Users can also explore stacks by categories such as Arts & Design, Education, and etc on the home page.

To facilitate newcomers, Delicious provides an option to import bookmarks from the web browsers to its site so that new users can quickly get started with the site.

Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Many features have contributed to this, including the website's simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication.

Use of Delicious is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user can download his or her own data through the site's API in an XML or JSON format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.

All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; the site is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections. Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature can be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.

There are several competing social bookmarking websites as well as a few open source clones.

History
The precursor to Delicious was Muxway, a link blog that had grown out of a text file that Schachter maintained to keep track of links related to Memepool. In September 2003, Schachter released the first version of Delicious. In March 2005, he left his day job to work on Delicious full-time, and in April 2005 it received approximately $2 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures and Amazon.com.

Yahoo! acquired Delicious on December 9, 2005. Various guesses suggest it was sold for somewhere between US$15 million and US$30 million.

On December 16, 2010, an internal slide from a Yahoo! meeting leaked, indicating that Delicious would be "sunsetted" in the future, which seemed to mean "shut down". Later Yahoo clarified that they would be selling Delicious, not ending it. These news resulted in Delicious users frantically looking for alternative sites. This benefits Pinboard (website), also a bookmarking site, which saw a huge surge of traffic and activity on its site. Various other services such as Google Bookmarks and Spabba also offered bookmarks migration tools to allow users to migrate and safeguard their bookmarks out of Delicious.

On April 27, 2011, Delicious announced the site was sold to Avos Systems, a company created by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Unbeknownst to members, Yahoo! operated the site until September 2011.

On September 26, 2011, Delicious launched its completely new version 3.0 design in beta. This redesign came in as a surprise to many of its users, with many features being disabled, removed or temporarily unavailable. AVOS Systems removed the Delicious Support Forum and had advised users that communication with Avos should take place via email. Reaction from users was overwhelmingly negative.

On November 9, 2011, AVOS Systems announced that they had acquired the link-saving service, Trunk.ly. Trunk.ly offered to automatically save all links that users have "liked" on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This acquisition led to the launch of Twitter Connector on Delicious on March 2, 2012.

Delicious under Avos Systems
Since purchased by AVOS Systems in April 27, 2011, Delicious had gone through significant UI redesigns and becoming more social.

On September 26, 2011, Delicious launched its completely new version 3.0 design in beta. Delicious added a new feature called Stacks that allows users to group multiple related links into a single page, and customize the Stack by adding title, description and a featured image.

On December 13, 2011, Delicious continued its work to redesign its site, including UI changes to link-saving page and Stacks page. The new design, especially for the Stacks page, is similar to the design of another popular social photo-sharing website Pinterest.

On January 20, 2012, Delicious added more social features into its Stacks page, allowing users to collaborate on the same Stack, as a public Stack or a private Stack among a group of users. The users can also comment on a stack and create a stack as a response to the original stack. This new social feature was considered as a good step against competitor such as Pinterest which does not offer private boards.

On March 2, 2012, Delicious continued its effort to be more social, by providing a Twitter Connector that allows users to connect their Twitter accounts to their Delicious accounts. This new feature allows links tweeted on Twitter to be automatically saved into the Delicious account.

Name
The "del.icio.us" domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect to the new domain, delicious.com.

In an interview, Schachter explained how he chose the name: "I'd registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words. In early discussions, a friend referred to finding good links as 'eating cherries' and the metaphor stuck, I guess."

On September 6, 2007, Schachter announced the website's name would change to "Delicious" when the site would be redesigned. The new design went live on July 31, 2008.

On June 16, 2011, AVOS Systems acquired d.me domain name.