Delicious

The web's shared memory

Zombie
19902026

Delicious (del.icio.us) invented social bookmarking and popularised tagging, launched by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and bought by Yahoo in 2005. Years of neglect and five ownership changes later, competitor Pinboard bought it in June 2017 and froze it read-only, where it remains.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2003
  2. September 2003 Launch
    del.icio.us launches

    Social bookmarking and tagging are born.

  3. 2005
  4. 9 December 2005 Acquisition
    Yahoo buys Delicious

    Web 2.0's poster child joins Yahoo's collection.

  5. 2010
  6. 16 December 2010 Incident
    The "sunset" slide leaks

    An internal Yahoo deck lists Delicious for shutdown; users flee to Pinboard.

  7. 2011
  8. 27 April 2011 Acquisition
    AVOS buys Delicious

    YouTube's founders take over; the redesign alienates the base.

  9. 2017
  10. 1 June 2017 Acquisition
    Pinboard buys Delicious for $35,000

    The rival that survived buys the pioneer that didn't.

  11. June 2017 Shutdown
    Delicious goes read-only

    Bookmarking ends; the archive stays up.

The site through time

Browse del.icio.us as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Joshua Schachter 2003–2005 Founded Started as a side project
Yahoo 2005–2011 Acquisition, reported $15-30M, undisclosed The "sunset" slide leaks in 2010
AVOS Systems 2011–2014 Acquisition, undisclosed YouTube founders' venture; controversial redesign
Science Inc. 2014–2016 Acquisition, undisclosed
Delicious Media 2016–2017 Acquisition, undisclosed
Pinboard 2017–2017 Acquisition, $35,000 Set read-only; kept as an archive

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: After passing through five owners, Delicious was bought by rival Pinboard in June 2017 and switched to read-only, ending sixteen years of social bookmarking.

Our analysis: Delicious invented tagging as we know it, then spent a decade being redesigned and resold by owners who each broke a little more of it. Its community had somewhere identical-but-stable to go: Pinboard, whose one-man operation eventually bought the corpse.

History [edit]

Tags, before hashtags

Joshua Schachter's del.icio.us, launched in 2003 with the era's most famous domain hack, let you save bookmarks publicly and label them with freeform tags. That simple act built something bigger: browsing other people's tags became a discovery engine, and "folksonomy", organisation emerging bottom-up from millions of users, became one of Web 2.0's founding ideas. Yahoo bought the site in December 2005.

Inside Yahoo it stagnated; a leaked 2010 slide marked it "sunset", triggering an exodus. The YouTube founders' AVOS bought it in 2011 and redesigned away much of what users loved; Science Inc. took it in 2014; Delicious Media in 2016. Each transition shed users and broke URLs.

Bought by its rival, for beer money

Through all of it, the one-man bookmarking service Pinboard, built openly as "Delicious without the nonsense", collected the refugees. In June 2017 Pinboard's Maciej Cegłowski bought Delicious outright for $35,000, wrote its obituary with visible affection ("bookmarking's most treasured graveyard"), and set the site to read-only. It stands still today, a frozen archive of how the web tagged itself between 2003 and 2017.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Pinboard Acquires Delicious Pinboard 1 June 2017 [archived]
  2. Pinboard buys social bookmarking site del.icio.us and closes it down BetaNews 4 June 2017 [archived]

Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).