Whatever happened to Delicious, the social bookmarking site?
I used Delicious a few years ago when I was doing my library masters. Me and my classmates used it to bookmark resources we found for a wiki we were going to create together as part of an assignment. It was all the rage at the time and worked well for our needs.
And then suddenly around 2010 no one seemed to be using it anymore. Social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and Digg fell out of favour. People started flocking to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which allowed for more social interaction. Instead of tagging, using Facebook's "Like" button became a popular way to bookmark content.
I decided to revisit Delicious. The website is still there but it looks woeful. The homepage is covered in ads and click bait. Why is it still even there? It's kind of sad seeing a once good service go into terminal decline. It's now ranked a dismal 1,235 on the Alexa Rank. (In contrast Pinterest is ranked 26). But I managed to find some of my old tags from 2010 and the links still work. In retrospect the process of adding bookmarks and creating tags was a bit laborious. I find using Twitter to retweet links much quicker and simpler.
Reddit, another social bookmarking site (with a lot of NSFW content), is still popular but it doesn't use tags like Delicious. Instead users vote submissions up or down to organize the posts and determine their position on the site's pages. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called "subreddits."
Tumblr is still going too and uses tagging (or folksonomies) like Delicious. I had a look at its "trending" page and it was full of GIF's. Arghh, they are so annoying! I much prefer Digg - it has a cleaner interface with more serious content. Rather than using tags it allows you to share content on Facebook.
There are now bookmarking sites aimed purely at academics like CiteULike. I'm not sure what advantage it has over EndNote though other than allowing you to share your citations with other users and use as a discovery tool.
And then suddenly around 2010 no one seemed to be using it anymore. Social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and Digg fell out of favour. People started flocking to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which allowed for more social interaction. Instead of tagging, using Facebook's "Like" button became a popular way to bookmark content.
I decided to revisit Delicious. The website is still there but it looks woeful. The homepage is covered in ads and click bait. Why is it still even there? It's kind of sad seeing a once good service go into terminal decline. It's now ranked a dismal 1,235 on the Alexa Rank. (In contrast Pinterest is ranked 26). But I managed to find some of my old tags from 2010 and the links still work. In retrospect the process of adding bookmarks and creating tags was a bit laborious. I find using Twitter to retweet links much quicker and simpler.
Reddit, another social bookmarking site (with a lot of NSFW content), is still popular but it doesn't use tags like Delicious. Instead users vote submissions up or down to organize the posts and determine their position on the site's pages. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called "subreddits."
Tumblr is still going too and uses tagging (or folksonomies) like Delicious. I had a look at its "trending" page and it was full of GIF's. Arghh, they are so annoying! I much prefer Digg - it has a cleaner interface with more serious content. Rather than using tags it allows you to share content on Facebook.
There are now bookmarking sites aimed purely at academics like CiteULike. I'm not sure what advantage it has over EndNote though other than allowing you to share your citations with other users and use as a discovery tool.
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