A Visual History of Delicious Bookmarks

Posted in June 2020

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the ephemerality of digital information in the face of an ever-increasing deluge of it. Entire media empires have risen and fallen in the span of time it used to take for a single piece of information to make its way around the globe, and that latency only promises to become lower as technology continues to advance.^1,² Unfortunately, as this deluge of information travels faster, it becomes harder to resurface pieces of it in your mind once it's been usurped. It also becomes harder to assimilate in the first place.³ That is, if you lack a way to capture and re-access it.

One of the first times I learned about both the capture of digital information, as well as its transience was with the social bookmarking website Delicious, created out of need by Joshua Schachter with the help of Peter Gadjokov. It was my introduction to bookmarking beyond default built-in browser capabilities, and for a few years during high school and college, it was an invaluable tool I used to capture and organize all kinds of internet ephemera.

Delicious' combination of tagging, descriptions, and other types of metadata options exposed me to the beauty of organizing and annotating the information I came across online. More importantly, it helped me learn to appreciate the importance of finding that bookmarked information later. Indeed, my bookmarking activities with Delicious are in part what led to my interest in the study of media and in media preservation.

"Metadata is a love note to the future."

— Jason Scott on Twitter

The Rise and Fall of Delicious

I wasn't the only one who was enticed by the promise of social bookmarking management in the early and mid-2000's. By 2007, four years after its launch and two years after it was sold to Yahoo, Delicious had amassed more than 3 million users who had bookmarked more than 100 million unique websites.⁴ Just a year later Delicious had grown to more than 5.3 million users who had bookmarked more than 180 million unique websites.⁵

It turns out social bookmarking management (as Delicious popularized it) fulfilled a growing need amongst internet users whose interactions with information were maturing along with the web. After multiple communications revolutions sparked by technological innovations, the past few centuries have seen an increasing splintering of information.⁶ Entire conceptual categories have sprung into human awareness in the wake of that fragmentation, and this rise in specialized modes of thought has contributed to information inflation by vastly expanding the number of ways in which excerpted information can be organized.

So what did Delicious do that met such a need? It popularized collaborative tagging as a way to informally categorize bookmarked information, and contributed to the ubiquity of tagging on the web.⁷ With its tagging system and additional layers of social metadata, the implications of collaborative tagging as a tool for community-wide classification quickly became apparent to individuals, organizations, and entire online subcultures alike by the mid-aughts.⁸

Community-sourced classification systems called folksonomies quickly emerged from this distributed network of democratized classification⁹. These user-generated forms of classification systems were based on descriptive metadata, which emphasizes the organization of information based on its intellectual content.¹⁰ This is in comparison to administrative metadata and structural metadata, which emphasize things like file type, creation date and interoperability of the information in question.

One of the online subcultures that quickly capitalized upon these non-hierarchical systems for collaborative information stewardship was the fandom community.¹¹ Fandom authors and readers alike used Delicious to not only save their own bookmarks, but to recommend, share and browse for bookmarks as well.

They did this by maximizing their use of built-in features beyond tags. For example, each Delicious bookmark was annotated by default with a number indicating how many other users had also bookmarked that URL. This was used as an informal indicator of credibility for good content amongst Delicious users. Features like subscriptions allowed users to keep track of their favorite tags, and networks allowed them to connect with their peers. Even within the realm of tagging, the use of namespaces became so sophisticated that discussions within the fandom community began to take place about best practices for syntax.¹²

Unfortunately Delicious ultimately languished after it was bought by Yahoo in 2005. Since then the world has observed its slow and steady decline from afar as it was resold a handful of times, including to Youtube's founders in 2011.¹³ The constant changing of hands and site overhauls caused a prolonged mass exodus from the platform, most notably to in March 2011 to Pinboard, which is Delicous' competitor-turned-successor.¹⁴ I recommend Pinboard to those who are looking for a solid social bookmarking manager, especially because it has a lot of the features Delicious popularized, but that's a topic for another post.

Now Delicious is owned by Maciej Cegłowski, the mastermind behind Pinboard.¹⁵ After his acquisition of Delicious, Cegłowski made the decision to shut down its functionality while leaving it in read-only mode as of June 15, 2017. He explained that his motivation was to preserve an important piece of internet history, something I agree with and appreciate wholeheartedly. Although the Delicious website has now been in read-only mode for a few years, its homepage currently displays a temporary error message, which it says is supposed to come down by July 24, 2020.

Delicious has over a billion bookmarks and is a fascinating piece of web history. Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard to keep Delicious down. I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.

— Maciej Cegłowski in "Pinboard Acquires Delicious"

Much has been written about what went wrong with Delicious, including the difficulty of monetizing it despite its massive user base,¹⁶ but that's not what I'm here to do. I'm more interested in documenting the progression of its web design as a study in the evolution of collaborative organization of excerpted digital information.

Delicious' demise was one of my first lessons regarding the transitory nature of digital information, especially the curated kind. Yet looking back now, it almost seems like it happened in slow motion compared to the speed at which digital brands and products can collapse and disappear by today's standards. While Delicious had a 14-year run, there are plenty examples of online entities-turned-cultural-forces that fizzled out within comparatively smaller time frames. Vine comes to mind – the short-form video platform was only around for four years before it was shuttered, yet it arguably had a huge impact on the trajectory of digital media and online video in the last decade.¹⁷

Despite its state of inactivity, Cegłowski's acquisition is probably the best thing that could have happened to Delicious given the state of the company when he intervened, even considering his humorous spirit of competitiveness.¹⁸ It's more consideration than many of its peers have received since then.

A History Told in Screenshots

In light of Delicious' significance in the history of the web, and especially in the context of Web 2.0, I thought I would share some of the screenshots I've come across that reflect Delicious’ various web design iterations over the years. I used the Internet Archive and Wikipedia as my jumping off points. This is a visual summary that spans the course of 16 years, from 2003 until 2019. It documents how the bookmarking website's approach to aesthetics, information architecture, and marketing design changed during a large chunk of its active period.

September 2003

Joshua Schachter's screenshot of the Delicious homepage from September 13, 2003, as posted on his Flickr account in 2007,¹⁹ shows what Delicious looked like within its first year of official development.

Joshua Schachter's screenshot of the Delicious homepage from September 13, 2003, as posted on his Flickr account in 2007, shows what Delicious looked like within its first year of official development. — Source: Flickr

September 2005

According to the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on September 16, 2005.²⁰

December 2005

According to the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on December 20, 2005.²¹

October 2006

According to the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on October 11, 2006.²²

Mid-2009

According to "A Guide to using Delicious" by Queen's University Belfast's Centre for Educational Development, this is what the Delicious homepage looked like sometime in mid-2009.²³

According to "A Guide to using Delicious" by Queen's University Belfast's Centre for Educational Development, this is a Delicious user page looked like sometime in mid-2009.²³

October 2010

According to "How to Use Delicious: The King of Social Bookmarking" by Kristi Hines from Social Media Examiner, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on October 11, 2010.²⁴

May 2011

According to the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on May 11, 2011.²⁵

According to Neil Patel's article, "12 Risky SEO Tactics That Might Work," and his Twitter post from March 29, 2017,²⁶ this is approximately what the search page on the Delicious website looked like at some point. Because there is no date associated with his screenshot, I used contextual clues to place it within this time period.

This is approximately what the search page on the Delicious website looked like at some point in 2011. Because there is no date associated with his screenshot, I used contextual clues to place it within this time period. — Source: NeilPatel.com

September 2011

This isn't a screenshot, but it's a video Delicious released on YouTube on September 26, 2011 to promote their new Stacks capabilities.²⁷

Source: Internet Archive

According to "Delicious hopes new taste will prove a hit," by Bobbie Johnson from Gigaom, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on September 27, 2011.²⁸

According to "Delicious Relaunches: Exclusive Q&A With CEO Chad Hurley" by Liz Gannes from AllThingsD, this is approximately what a Delicious stacks page looked like on September 26, 2011.²⁹

May 2012

According to the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on May 12, 2012.³⁰

August 2012

According to the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on August 30, 2012.³¹

February 2013

According to Bootstrap Expo, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on February 1, 2013.³²

And according to "New Delicious Coming Soon" by Nicole C. Engard from Web2Learning, this is approximately what a Delicious tag listing page would have looked like on early 2013 based on an announcement they posted on January 3, 2013.³³

And according to Nicole C. Engard from Web2Learning, this is approximately what a Delicious tag listing page would have looked like on early 2013 based on an announcement they posted on January 3, 2013. — Source: Web2Learning

And according to "Delicious is Streamlined, Better for Business" by Mike Allton from Business 2 Community, this is approximately what a Delicious user page would have looked like on early 2013 based on an announcement they posted on January 30, 2013.³⁴

October 2013

According to a combination of info from designer Sparanoid's website as well as the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like around October 1, 2013.³⁵

According to designer Sparanoid's website, this is approximately what a Delicious user page looked like around October 1, 2013.³⁶

March 2016

According to the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on March 15, 2016.³⁷

May 2016

According to the Internet Archive, this is approximately what the Delicious homepage looked like on May 14, 2016.³⁷

December 2019

According to Ton Zĳlstra's website, this is what a Delicious user profile page looked like on around December 24, 2019.³⁸

What's Next for this Project?

Write "Design Analysis of Delicious Bookmarks"
Write "What Is Digital Bookmarking?"
Write "The Types of Digital Bookmarks and Excerpts"

References

This may seem like a ridiculous amount of references, but I wrote this for myself and my research. To that end it's helpful to have a list like this to refer back to whenever I re-read this.

¹ "Cultural Latency & The Dawning of the Information Age" (Accessed June 15, 2020)

² "Rands in Repose" also mentions buzz latency (Accessed June 14, 2020)

³ On Reducing the Detrimental Information Flood in the Use of Internet (Accessed June 16, 2020)

⁴ Exclusive: Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 Preview (Accessed June 15, 2020)

⁵ Delicious is 5! (Accessed June 14, 2020)

⁶ Information Inflation (Accessed June 16, 2020)

⁷ del.icio.us / help / tags (Accessed June 16, 2020)

⁸ Tagging : people-powered metadata for the social web (Accessed June 16, 2020)

⁹ Structure and form of folksonomy tags: The road to the public library catalogue (Accessed June 16, 2020)

¹⁰ Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata (Accessed June 16, 2020)

¹¹ Delicious | Fanlore (Accessed June 16, 2020)

¹² Why [], :, !, and . have no place in your delicious bookmarks (Accessed June 16, 2020)