ReadWriteWeb

Today the Q&A site Quora announced the debut of boards, which function a lot like stacks do on social bookmarking site, Delicious. Boards organize information around a specific topic, making it simpler for users to follow related content. You can collect similar questions that are already up on Quora and grab links from outside the sites. Considering that Quora is all about questions, why would it choose to go this route?

Ever since its redesign, Delicious has looked increasingly like mainstream social bookmarking site Pinterest. The latest Delicious UI overhaul applies the same visually focused look to the link-saving page, which was operating under the "old" look until just today. The new design is focused on visuals and stacks, whereas the old version was more about tags and recommended tags. Is it bad that Delicious is trying to copy Pinterest's look?

Jori Lallo, a web and mobile designer at developer-loving message board startup Convore, has released a new version of a side project built with Finnish designer Karri Saarinen, called Kippt.

It's a bookmarking app along the lines of Delicious or Pinboard but without social sharing, with a stripped-down Reader view of all articles and with a nice simple aesthetic. Lallo says a number of new features are in the works and if you like simple tools developers build for solving everyday problems, Kippt could be a good service to try out and keep an eye on.

What was once awesome and useful is now filled with dogs in costumes and photos of donuts.

Trailblazing social bookmarking service Delicious relaunched this morning under new management: Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, the co-founders of YouTube who bought the neglected service from Yahoo earlier this year. The plan is to make the service appealing to a larger number of mainstream users. So far it's pretty underwhelming.

When Yahoo bought Delicious years ago, I was disappointed it wasn't the Library of Congress that made the acquisition. It was that useful. Now this new Delicious looks like just another Web 2.0 startup.

What do you get when you collect and categorize the reading interests and intentions of millions of people exploring around the web? Fans of social bookmarking service Delicious have always believed you get a big win-win: bookmarkers are able to access links of interest them later, from any computer, and the rest of us get to watch from the outside and discover interesting new links in the wake of all that saving.

Delicious didn't really work out that well in the long run, though, and, five years after it was acquired, then neglected, by Yahoo, it was bought this spring by a team led by Youtube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Jenna Wortham of the New York Times caught up with the new company this weekend and reported on some of the thinking behind the forthcoming rebirth of Delicious. What it needs, I believe, is to be easier to use, more relevant and more attractive in design.

The news this week about firing Carol Bartz, Yahoo's CEO, made us go into the Wayback Machine to recall the many good things that Yahoo has created over its life. While there are many that are lining up to take shots at the Yahoos (certainly justified, including this mention of Bartz here), there are still some things worth noting that came out of Yahoo or that were touched by the company.

Joshua Schachter, founder of the world-changing social networking service Delicious, late last night quietly unveiled his newest work. It's called Jig and it's a site for posting your needs and getting responses from other users.

In many ways "what do you need" is the most basic of questions for a tool to ask a human. Jig applies the best practices of contemporary lightweight social networks to the problem of people filling each others' needs online. It's not fully baked yet, but it's got a team filled with rockstars, a beguiling simplicity to it and it may very well unfold into a compelling service to use. I began testing the service a few months ago but news about it unfolded publicly last night on Techmeme.

Social bookmarking service Delicious has been in the news lately because of Yahoo's controversial plan to "sunset" it, followed by the sale of the company to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Delicious used to face a lot of social bookmarking competition, though. One of the most-hyped competitors, a Seattle company called BlueDot, which later changed its name to Faves.com, quietly announced this afternoon that it will close up shop in a matter of days and put its assets up for sale.

How hyped was this service? It had backing from former Starbucks Senior VP Don Valencia, former Microsoft Senior VP Richard Fade and Mark Zbikowski, creator of the DOS executable file format (.EXE). Michael Arrington chose it over Delicious as a Web service he couldn't live without and Mashable called it the only other Delicious-type service worth writing a positive review of. I reviewed it in great detail five years ago at TechCrunch. For all that enthusiasm, though, smart features and good design couldn't make BlueDot take off with users.

Earlier this week it was announced that Yahoo is selling social bookmarking service Delicious to the founders of YouTube and their new company called Avos. After the announcement was made, the companies told everyone who had ever had a Delicious account that they needed to log in and opt-in to having their data transferred over into the new company.

You should go do that right now, even if you're not a big Delicious user anymore. It takes 30 seconds to do and is something good to do for yourself and for the good of the Web. If you don't, that data will disappear. Philosophically, that's bad because all your "data exhaust" like that is going to become an important currency of the future Web, an important asset whether it seems that way today or not. Practically, though, there are three important reasons why you should go take a moment to make sure that data is preserved.

When the news was leaked last fall that Yahoo was planning on "sunsetting" the bookmarking service Delicious, you could hear the hearts of a million geeks breaking. As ReadWriteWeb co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote in a lovely requiem to the site, "R.I.P. Delicious. You Were So Beautiful To Me."

For its part, Yahoo later clarified that "sunsetting" didn't mean "killing." It meant selling. And today we now know who the buyers are: YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.