*Investing this kind of intellectual, moral and creative effort in a Web startup is like building a giant socially-generated sandcastle... that not only automagically drowns itself, but brings in a tide that washes away the foundations of formerly solid buildings.
*Yahoo! is now trying to sell Delicious instead of simply exterminating it like an unwanted humming beehive in its walls... But if you're the likes of our Harvard Business Review commenter here, who was a big Delicious booster, why would you ever again trust Yahoo! Inc with a burnt-out match?
*Amazing to think that such a huge business is built on mere "trust," but then again, what are dollars built on? If you get a piece of paper and it says it's worth something... Hey wait a sec, I bet I could go on Delicious and look around for "gold bug" and find all kinds of cool bookmarks about that!
http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2010/12/yahoos-delicious-decision-leav-1.html
(...)
"If it sounds like I'm taking the Delicious news personally, that's because Delicious is where I first fell in love with Web 2.0's potential to create value through network effects. I stored my first bookmark on October 14, 2004, on the day I wrote my very first blog post. A 2005 article I wrote about Delicious for the Toronto Star helped me get on the radar of the incipient web 2.0 blogosphere, and was crucial to establishing our company, Social Signal.
"Since then I've written countless blog posts about different ways to use Delicious, evangelized Delicious to thousands of people in successive web trainings, and integrated Delicious RSS feeds into many social media monitoring dashboards and websites, including our own. For a long while I even wore my Delicious tag cloud on my laptop. I still feel thrilled when someone says to me — as someone did just a few weeks ago — that learning about this service was the highlight of a weeks-long social media training. Sometimes I feel like my whole social media career is just an outlet for the Delicious evangelism that could be equally well-served by doing demos on a street corner, busking with a wi-fi-connected computer and an open laptop case.
"All that passion — all those bookmarks! — add up to an investment that amounts to a far bigger commitment than the purchase of Yahoo! shares. A Yahoo! shareholder can dump their stock tonight (and may well, judging from the online reaction to the Delicious rumor), and reinvest in another company tomorrow. For Delicious users, it's not so easy: I may be able to export my bookmarks, but it will be much harder to re-establish all the tag subscriptions, work flows and shared knowledge collections that I built up in collaboration with other delicious users.
(((Now, as a further speculative exercise, imagine that computers get disinvented because the Internet is "a net loss to capitalists." You have a typewriter. Get to work and generate some revenue with that device.)))
"The investment of users like me is what makes Web 2.0 fundamentally different from Web 1.0, the one that saw its investors disappear in a giant cloud of smoke when the dot-boom bubble burst. The Web 1.0 boom was based on an old standby, perceived shareholder value. The web 2.0 boom is based on something that is, in principle, much more durable: user-generated value. (((User-generated value apparently isn't a "bubble" or a "giant cloud of smoke." Can anyone explain why? Whoever they were, they didn't convnce Yahoo.)))
"But it's only durable if users continue to trust that their contributions to Delicious, ((("continuity of trust" = "giant cloud of bubble smoke"))) and to other social media sites, will be received in good faith. Good faith ((("good faith" = "giant cloud of bubble smoke"))) means that when a company decides it can no longer sustain its community of users, it does its best to preserve the value they have created by giving the community its best possible shot at a new business model, a new owner or a new home. ((("New business model in new home" = "giant cloud of bubble smoke" that doesn't even exist yet.))) Yahoo!'s silence on the subject of the Delicious rumor speaks volumes about its commitment to the. platform, and to the users who have been the greatest contributors to its growth. ((("Giant cloud of bubble smoke full of burning user resentment." Look out, Yahoo.)))
"So yes, go back up your bookmarks...." (((Although, due to inherent Internet link rot, your bookmarks are losing value almost as fast as you can type.)))
