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What’s precluding Joshua from working on a big, popular product? I would think that he can, in fact, work on anything that interests him and I don’t see from these stories any barriers to his working on a big popular product.

I realize that there are startups who can do OK inside larger firms . . . but man, what a risk.

Can’t they just divest Delicious back off to its own entity?

Also – this is why you charge money in the first place.

Scott – He’s saying the ‘payout’ from Yahoo for selling Delicious doesnt compare to just running something for fun.

Drew, I see. But now he can do both. He got the payout and can also work on his next big, popular product. In that respect I think it’s worked out fine for him. I’m just saying it’s not as much an either-or choice as this quote makes it seem.

The choice between ‘cash’ and ‘fun’ is a false dilemma.

Yahoo! sucks.

What’s precluding Joshua from working on a big, popular product? I would think that he can, in fact, work on anything that interests him and I don’t see from these stories any barriers to his working on a big popular product.

The fact that he HAD one, now he doesn’t. Making something big and popular is really hard and really rare.

If Yahoo! gave you back Delicious right now, how would you make money on it?

Hmm, comment got chomped. What I had writter was

I’d love to hear Joshua answer this question: If Yahoo! gave you back Delicious right now, how would you make money on it?

Delicious isn’t a business, it’s an expensive luxury that a failing company can’t afford.

Yeah, it’s a real shame. It was one of the great simple, early generation 2.0 defining tools.

But then again, Yahoo are not totally stupid – if it wasn’t generating revenue, why WOULD they keep it? What was the cross-pollenation of yahoo services from delicious? Was it worth the investment/development?

I would think a Flickr-style model (also bought by Yahoo!) of “Pro” users who pay a small, yearly fee would work well for Delicious.

Keep the features the same for both the huge number of free users and Pro users, but allow the Pro users to see all of their bookmarks, while free users only see the last 200 or so they added. I think a respectable percentage of Delicious users would be willing to cough up $12/year or so.

I believe we got another case of the WinAmp™ here

As a long-time user of Delicious, I sent them a rant about this issue myself which I have posted here. The short-sightedness is alarming, but sadly it’s a typical dotcom story. Thanks for the updates btw, it’s good to see the posts about it here.

I feel Yahoo! are a fat kid with a cake. They want it all, they think they can handle it and are quite pleased with themselves afterwards until the stomachache and regret kicks in.

I understand a company that large has to remain dynamic, but I do not understand how they are struggling so much with this. They claim they’re one of the greatest web companies of all time and yet somehow can not even handle keeping many a website up.

http://pinboard.in/

This is how you make money.

Time goes by, business and products come and go. Maybe we should see this as an opportunity to make another great product.