Not So Delicious

Well, it was bound to happen. Yahoo has decided to sunset some of its services, and that includes social bookmarking site Delicious.

And here we see one of the inherent dangers of relying on (free) third-party sites for business and personal purposes. If you don't have control over your data, you're exposing yourself to a potential house of cards that can come tumbling down at any time. It's always a good idea to have your data backed up, even in the cloud-based environment. For bookmarks in particular, Xmarks actually allows you to sync and back up your bookmarks across a number of browsers.

But before you panic about Delicious, it looks like there may be a future for them after all - just not at Yahoo. In their own blog, Delicious states that they will in fact remain open for business - just not with Yahoo.

Delicious offered the following statement to users:

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?
- No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

What if I want to get my bookmarks out of Delicious right away?
- As noted above, there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it. That said, we have export options if you so choose. Additionally, many services provide the ability to import Delicious links and tags.
We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We’ll let you know more as things develop.

Now, if you'd still like to take the leap and migrate your bookmarks to other sites, here are some alternatives to using Delicious (courtesy of Read Write Web) and others from TheNextWeb. I've been trying out Diigo and Evernote, and now Microsoft's OneNote with my new Windows 7 / Office 2010 system, but at the moment, I'm comfortable staying with Delicious myself.

How about you? Are there other clipping or bookmarking services that you use or prefer? Educate us all in the comments section.

Photo credit: Kymberly Janisch (Flickr) Labels: del.icio.us, news

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