Last month Yahoo announced that it would be “sunsetting” Delicious, the social bookmarking service that many ProfHacker readers use for research, teaching, and collaboration. “Sunsetting” was taken to be an industry euphemism for “killing off,” although the Delicious team announced the following day that they were “not shutting down Delicious.” Rather, Yahoo is looking for a third-party to buy Delicious, which ideally, would continue to operate without any interruption in service. The Delicious developers ended their announcement by saying “there’s no reason to panic,” which of course meant that everyone panicked.
The rush on exporting bookmarks from Delicious was nothing less than a bank run, but unlike many banks, Delicious is still standing a month later. Still, it’s conceivable that at some point in the future Delicious as we know it may change. If that happens, what alternatives to Delicious are out there? What service can replace Delicious’s drop-dead easy tagging and sharing of links? Here are a few suggestions:
Pinboard
Pinboard is a stripped-down version of Delicious that most Delicious users will find to be very familiar. Unlike Delicious, however, Pinboard costs money: a one-time fee pegged to the current number of Pinboard users (the fee equals the number of users multiplied by $0.001). Currently that one-time charge is $9.18, up from the $6 range when it was first leaked that Delicious was on the chopping block. It’s a simple matter to switch to Pinboard, as the service easily imports your Delicious bookmarks, tags and all.
Pinboard has several stand-out features not available in Delicious: Pinboard can automatically add URLs from your Twitter favorites, Google Reader or Instapaper accounts; Pinboard can automatically mirror your Delicious bookmarks; and premium users who pay $25/year can archive entire pages (as opposed to simply bookmarking them).
Diigo
Diigo is feature-rich bookmarking and sharing site that’s been around for a while. The entry-level version of Diigo is ad-supported, while the Basic and Premium versions cost $20/year or $40/year, respectively. These paid versions offer page caching, image saving, and unlimited annotations. There’s also an Education Account, which removes the ads and raises various limits placed on the free account. An Education Account requires a special application; it took roughly 2 days for mine to be approved. With the Education Account you can set up groups for your students, making it easier to share and build group libraries.
I’ve had a free Diigo account since 2007, though I’ve rarely used it. That’s because the service has always felt bloated to me. It does social bookmarking, but also many other things (annotating web pages and sharing those notes with others, for example) that I already used other services for. I like Delicious because it does one thing, and it does it well, without distractions. Which brings me to a third possibility…
Delicious
What? Delicious as an alternative to Delicious? Yes, indeed.
Delicious isn’t dead yet, so why not keep using it? If it’s already part of your work flow and you have a deep library of links and tags saved there, why not stick around a while? This is in fact what I have done. I’ve exported my existing Delicious bookmarks to Pinboard, and then set Pinboard up to mirror any new links I add to Delicious. It’s the best of both worlds: I continue to use the Delicious bookmarklets, plugins, and other hacks that are second nature to me, but everything I add is also sent to Pinboard, so I can switch in an instant.
Other Possibilities
There are countless other alternatives to Delicious, ranging from your browser’s own bookmarking tools (how novel!) to Zotero—though not all of these options focus on tagging and sharing. For a thorough list of dozens of possibilities, I recommend Alternatives to Delicious, a crowd-sourced Google Doc started by Alec Couros. Whatever you choose, keep in mind the Ma.gnolia debacle, in which a Delicious-like service went down, for good, taking all of its users’ data with it. The lesson is that no matter what bookmarking service you use, back it up. All of the major services allow you to export your data, and you should do so, frequently.
What are you doing about your Delicious bookmarks? Have you found an alternative you like? And has the scare about Delicious changed the way you keep track of important links? Let us know!
[Bookmark Photograph courtesy of Flickr user Emran Kassim / Creative Commons Licensed]
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14 Responses to Alternatives to Delicious
pelf81 - January 17, 2011 at 8:56 am
My blog reader recommended Licorize (www.licorize.com), which I tried out and am still using. It’s pretty much like Delicious, but also has screenshots as well (Delicious doesn’t). So far, I’m liking it :D
I’m not sure about this whole ditching Delicious idea but at the same time, it sometimes feel like somebody may buy it and discontinue it, I don’t know.
dlewis9 - January 17, 2011 at 9:35 am
I prefer Evernote. Since I keep research notes and other docs there, it was nice to export all my Delicious bookmarks into that program, same tags and all.
dlewis9 - January 17, 2011 at 9:38 am
Of course, it’s best for saving online articles, not sites you return to often.
drnels - January 17, 2011 at 11:14 am
At the time all of this was happening, weren’t people complaining about Diigo’s privacy policy? Has that been cleared up?
mark_sample - January 17, 2011 at 12:06 pm
@drnels – Yes, some issues had come up with Diigo. It wasn’t their privacy policy, but rather their security practices. The login for Diigo was transmitted plaintext, meaning it was easily hackable. Diigo reports that it’s not possible to log into the service securely.
@dlewis9 – We’ve written about Evernote in ProfHacker before, and a lot of us like the service. It’s great for archiving material for your own needs, but virtually impossible to share your web clippings with others. It’s not really a social-bookmarking service, i.e. a way to share and discover useful sites—which is what Delicious does, and does well.
paul_r - January 18, 2011 at 5:20 am
I have tried them all, and without a doubt the new springpad is amazing. You can also export your delicious bookmarks too it too. I find it better than evernote as it serves as my task manager as well as my capture everything (and a great android app that I can take photos of things, or voice notes and save them, and save even tweets from twitter). It is the one place that everything lives (and you can make pages public if you want). And it is free!
It is also very user friendly as you can organise according to folders (projects/courses) and things can exist in multiple folders, have tags, attach notes, web addresses, pdfs, etc. I must admit I can’t speak highly enough about springpad – and no, I have nothing to do with springpad!
edwebb - January 18, 2011 at 7:56 am
I’ve been using Diigo for years, and encourage my students to do so, too. The annotation capabilities make it much more useful as a teaching and learning tool than a straight bookmarking service – one can identify passages of particular interest and comment on them, modeling active reading practices for students. Some of my students are indifferent, but some love it and use it in all their work once introduced.
weevie833 - January 18, 2011 at 10:53 am
http://qur.ly/
This service is still in development, but it’s a keen idea: a single shortened link to represent an infinite web of other links, like ZIPping files in a folder. Developed by a couple Syracuse University iSchool students.
- Steve
chrisrt - January 18, 2011 at 2:55 pm
I would like to add my company, YourVersion, to your list of Delicious alternatives.
YourVersion is a free service that imports your Delicious bookmarks, tags and notes instantly. We offer the majority of the features of Delicious built right into the product. We also have many items that Delicious users are already familiar with such as browser tools to bookmark from anywhere on the web and a Profile page where you can share your bookmarks with your friends.
In addition to those tools, YourVersion also offers free mobile apps for iPad, iPhone and Android. I invite those looking for a great free solution with instant bookmark import to try YourVersion today at http://yourversion.com
billso - January 18, 2011 at 3:00 pm
I’ve been using Diigo for a month now, and it’s OK. The annotation features are helpful.
Evernote is an alternative, although its speed left a lot to be desired with my 5000+ Delicious links.
Ilana DeBare - September 22, 2011 at 2:10 am
Here’s a view from the other side of the street. I was a Squaw participant this summer, and had two opportunities to get feedback on my work.
One opportunity was through the group workshops that took place every morning. The quality of the writers in my group was high — in their own writing and their ability to judge others’ work on its merits, and their ability to deliver thoughtful, supportive criticism that might be tough but was not nasty. One thing that Squaw does that I found particularly helpful was to rotate the workshop leaders — we had the same group members but a different writer/agent/editor leading us each day, so we were exposed to a variety of teaching styles and approaches to writing.
The other opportunity was through a one-to-one critique session with a faculty member assigned by the conference. Elise was mine! She was terrific — careful reader, good suggestions, very encouraging.
I’m one of those folks who has been writing my whole adult life (newspapers, non-fiction etc.) but never was in an MFA program. I learned a LOT about craft in one week at Squaw! Highly recommended.
I did a blog post with some of my personal takeaways on craft at http://midlifebatmitzvah.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/random-writing-tips-from-squaw/
Bob Mayer - September 29, 2011 at 11:49 am
Those are the best known conferences for literary writers or those of the MFA ilk. If you write genre, consider others such as San Diego State University, Pikes Peak, Surrey International, Emerald City, PNWA, Thrillerfest, RWA National, etc.
I find a strange dichotomy in conferences and publishing where conferences like the ones you mention won’t even respond to my queries about being on their faculty. Much like MFA programs won’t consider most applicants if they don’t have that appropriate MFA or PhD, regardless of publishing credentials.
Publishing is an industry, by the way. Unless you make your living teaching it, in which case you’re in the academic industry, which has its own rules and best minds.
I’ve shaken my head as MFA directors immediately reject a query I send them in favor of graduates of similar programs who have yet to earn their spurs in publishing. 45 novels, NY Times and all the other bestseller lists, 4 million books sold, hundreds of workshops and presentations with tens of thousands of writers– none of that matters much in the academic world.
I submit that where your primary income comes from determines what kind of writer you are. If it comes from teaching, then you are a teacher first and writer second. If it comes from writing, then you are a writer first, and teacher second. Thus, students should take this into account and decide which path they wish to pursue. Neither is right or wrong. Just they will lead you to different places.
info8036 - October 9, 2011 at 5:55 am
I think that you will find that the annual Key West Writer’s seminar is quite an exception. It attracts a serious roster of guest authors as well as participants. Check out their website.
solom31597 - January 5, 2012 at 10:58 am
There’s only so much room. I’m in Georgia, and lots of locals seriously think Dale Murphy should be a Baseball Hall of Famer. Hall of the Very Good maybe.
OTOH, my three favorite poets didn’t make the Dove cut. Robert Penn Warren was mentioned above. But with all the angst about so many missed poets that would be a volume by themselves (cutting which from the Dove list?), my two most favorite poets don’t even make the whiners’ lists: Thomas McGrath and J. V. Cunningham.
But they make other anthologies. Ignoring titles soley by each of the three, I have:
Cunningham (Mark Strand, Robert Penn Warren, Oscar Williams)
McGrath (Robert Bly (x2), John Bradley, Kurt Brown, Christopher Buckley, Terrence Des Pres, Sam Hamill, John Judson, Alan Kaufman, Estelle Gershgoren Novak, Morty Sklar, Seymour Yesner)
Warrren (Cleanth Brooks, Kate Farrell, Louis Untermeyer, Robert Penn Warren, Oscar Williams (x2))
Seek them and the missing others elsewhere.
Stop whining and read (and listen).