The Delicious saga continues … In reaction to what many have thought to be Yahoo’s mismanagement of the popular bookmarking service Delicious in the past couple of months, many people have tried to roll their own Delicious importers in hopes of taking advantage of the traffic exodus. Google too has today rolled out a Delicious migration tool for Google Bookmarks, to give people who were scared of the demise of Delicious a safe haven for their meticulously curated links.
On background: Yahoo gave many people a scare a couple of months ago when an internal Yahoo slide was leaked, revealing that Yahoo would be sunsetting Delicious, a social bookmarking site with a vehement cult following. It turns out that by “sunsetting” Yahoo actually meant selling (heh, that’s not actually what sunsetting means!). But while Yahoo has approached numerous people about unloading the property, it still has not found a buyer after three months.
Google would have been an excellent choice.
Just like the homegrown migrating services, you can login to the Bookmarks importer with either your Yahoo ID or your Delicious ID to import all your bookmarks and tags. And whatever you’ve bookmarked on Delicious integrates seamlessly with your already existing Google Bookmarks links.
Google launched Google Bookmarks in 2005 as a rival to Delicious and we pretty much forgot about it right until it launched a Lists feature in May. Lists let you copy your bookmarks into lists in order to share publicly and with friends and is completely under-utilized in my opinion. Under the right auspices, I could see Lists becoming a fulcrum for the social search element of Google News.
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Right now to bookmark a site on Google Bookmarks you need to either click a star next to what you want bookmarked in your search results history, import your browser bookmarks or add favorite sites manually, which isn’t the most intuitive process. But Google Bookmarks is in the Google Toolbar and apparently sees a lot of use, so let’s hope this is the first in a series of forward-thinking revamps.
Interesting side note: Delicious founder Joshua Schachter used to work at Google before founding Tasty Labs.
http://twitter.com/#!/google/statuses/38389631502401537
