Del.icio.us Finally Gets Some Respect from Yahoo
Yahoo bought popular social bookmarking service Delicous three and a half years ago and it's just now making moves to allow outsiders more access to the incredible data that's stored there. The company announced this morning that the Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) platform can now pull in Delicious bookmarking history and top tags for any URL that's been bookmarked two or more times.
Make no mistake about it, the vast majority of people on the web still have no idea that they can save their bookmarks outside their browsers. Yahoo has done a terrible job leveraging and growing this incredible database of user-categorized links of interest. Now the company is giving developers an opportunity to do so. Why is this important? Read on for some examples of what's now possible thanks to BOSS/Delicious integration.
Two calls for Delicious data are now supported inside BOSS: the number of times a URL has been bookmarked and the top tags that users have applied to categorize that URL. Delicious has its own API, but it's not as helpful as this integration with BOSS is.
BOSS is a technology that allows any website to use the Yahoo index and search processing power to build a topic-specific search engine on their own site. What could BOSS plus Delicious look like?
Some query types we can imagine being made possible by this integration are:
* I do a news search for a topic like the Textron buy-out or golfer Ross Fisher (two hot search terms today) and BOSS + Delicious shows me which URLs in my list of search results have been tagged "analysis" the most, or "biography."
* Search an index of food blogs for recipes and tell me which of them have been bookmarked the most and have been tagged "Mediterranean" and "vegetarian." The words Mediterranean and vegetarian may not appear anywhere in the text of the recipe, but human readers can recognize the recipe as fitting into both those categories and tag it as such when bookmarking it.
* Look up the links that my blog commenters post along with their comments and show me the top tags that other people have used to categorize those links. Perhaps, more marketers than engineers commented on my last blog post. I'd like to know that. Perhaps, I've had an influx of teachers, preachers or veterinarians commenting on my blog lately. Who wouldn't want to see that kind of data?
These are just a few examples of the kinds of data that we can imagine BOSS + Delicious offering up. We're sure readers can noodle just a bit on permutations of URL, times bookmarked, and top tags in order to come up with all kinds of other scenarios. Any time you've got millions of people saying "this link is important to me and these are the words I'd use to describe it" then that's really valuable information to be able to access programmatically.
Now imagine what could happen if Yahoo helped more people discover social bookmarking and opened up even more access to that data. It's absolutely tragic that this hasn't happened yet, but perhaps a little BOSS action is the beginning. If knowledge and information are value, then Yahoo has taken a small pipe connected to a potentially huge reservoir of black gold and let it just run down the drain, unused for the last three years. Yahoo adopted a baby with the potential to grow into an incredible adult and then forgot to feed and care for it for three years. It's quite upsetting.
It would be great if Delicious saw continued development in directions that supported this data-centric approach of leveraging crowdsourced attention signals. We're not sure how much hope for that is warranted though, given that so little progress has been made in that direction so far.
Disclosures: The author is a member of a Yahoo! Product Advisory Council and has multiple consulting clients in or around the social bookmarking sector.
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I wonder if this is an effort to get more people to use Delicious, or more people to use BOSS. Either way, it's awesome news...
I've never wanted you to be wrong before, Marshall... but I hope it's *not* too late. :-)
Matt - I hope I'm wrong too.
Yes they've been really neglecting it. They were sitting on top of so much user-generated metadata. And this all years and years before Twitter. (Twitter is now a link-sharing network for many)
Posted by: Meryn Stol
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April 9, 2009 12:54 PM
Good that they're leveraging the community for this through BOSS. I still wonder if Yahoo can become my primary search engine at some time, because of BOSS. Yahoo search still doesn't feel as nice as Google search to me.
Posted by: Meryn Stol
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April 9, 2009 12:56 PM
Marshall, I think you meant "Yahoo adopted a baby." instead of "Delicious adopted a baby". (2nd last paragraph)
I fully agree with your article. It's very sad that Yahoo seemingly hasn't done anything with the data up to now. Let's just hope for the best.
Interesting news - thanks. I agree that providing more access to such data is a good thing.
- Vasudev
someone had to mention twitter. ugh. what a lame fad.
I don't see how this is useful for searching - as far as I can tell, you can't use the tags to get find links - you can only get tags once a search has been performed. How is this useful?
Levitna, Yahoo BOSS plus a visitor's search query gives you the links, then Delicious gives you the tags. It's the opposite of the way people sometimes think of social bookmarking - tags for the purpose of organizing links. It's kinda link links being the doorway to tags, which are then used to judge between links.
Del.icio.us has been dead for about a year. Delicious.com is the thing you mean.
At last, Yahoo does something with Delicious. It was about time, their v2 was really a big dispointment.
I would have loved a consumer product, but I guess this BOSS integration makes sense and will give birth to cool products, eventualy.
Thanks Marshall for this post.
I think it is really a good piece of news that yahoo eventually get interested in delicious. Delicious, is an awesome service and one of the milestones of web2.0
However, I am not sure that will be efficient enough. I mean it gathers two big drawbacks of the web of this last 10 years. First, list organisation just limit the reality of choice. Second, tag is really efficient for objective description but when it comes to subjectivity its quite Confusing. A competitor as to me will be not be a competitor for you.
That is why, I think Yahoo is combinating old recipies to make a new sauce. I do beleive more in visual bookmarking solutions just like what www.peartlrees.com offers.
See here the map I made about restaurants in Paris
http://www.pearltrees.com/Francois/map/1_24511/
It surprises me how quickly Yahoo disintegrated from a culture of innovation into a culture of moribund bureaucracy.
I still wonder if Yahoo can become my primary search engine at some time, because of BOSS. Yahoo search still doesn't feel as nice as Google search to me.
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It was about time, their v2 was really a big dispointment.
I fully agree with your article. It's very sad that Yahoo seemingly hasn't done anything with the data up to now. Let's just hope for the best.
I fully agree with your article. It's very sad that Yahoo seemingly hasn't done anything with the data up to now. Let's just hope for the best.
It surprises me how quickly Yahoo disintegrated from a culture of innovation into a culture of moribund bureaucracy.
mario oyunları
I fully agree with your article. It's very sad that Yahoo seemingly hasn't done anything with the data up to now. Let's just hope for the best.
Thanks for the information you provide
done up like this. Fine, the guest bedroom. The wife would kill me if I took down any of her Johnny Depp posters in the master. Just kidding, those are mine. But seriously, they're not coming down.
I fully agree with your article. It's very sad that Yahoo seemingly hasn't done anything with the data up to now. Let's just hope for the best