One of the places where I try to remain productive is with my bookmarks. Yesterday my solution was Delicious, but today its Evernote. If you are not familiar with bookmarks, here is the Wikipedia entry on the subject but the easy answer is bookmarks are used to mark specific webpages. Most web browsers come with a bookmarking solution but typically they are not cloud based solutions. Also, the options with your browser tend to be limited in terms of abilities. Translation – using a third party for your bookmarks tends to be a much better solution.
I use bookmarks for a variety of reasons and prior to electing to utilize Delicious I had conducted a fair amount of research to determine that would be my choice. Delicious also happens to have been bought by Yahoo! a few years back. As you might be aware, Yahoo! has had a few problems over the past few years and they, like many other businesses, are continually re-examining what they do, and how they do it. Unfortunately one area that Yahoo! has elected to no longer support is MY bookmarking company, Delicious.
I say MY bookmarking company because bluntly I’ve come to rely on MY company, and I’m pretty upset that I’m learning from third party sites (the news) that Yahoo! is no longer going to be supporting Delicious. I’m gathering from the other reactions online that I am not alone in being upset about both this news and also how it has been handled – another black eye for Yahoo!. Apparently the folks over at Delicious are also upset at how this is being handled, and they’ve even posted on their blog (“What’s New for Delicious“) saying that the service will remain active, albeit under some as yet determined new ownership structure.
New ownership sounds like a great idea, but meanwhile I’m stuck. I like bookmarking. I also like solutions.
So I’ve turned to a new company to handle my bookmarking needs, and that is a company called Evernote. So far I’m pretty pleased. While I like the fact that Evernote is much more centered on ME, allowing ME to have all my notes on my desktop as well as on the cloud, one aspect of Delicious that I liked a great deal was the community – when I needed to search for a solution there was always the ability to see what the Delicious crowd had to say about a particular subject, and yes, that could weigh heavily in what links I chose to view – social proof.
I’ll put together a detailed review of Evernote soon enough, but for now, having just spent a few hours over the weekend moving my bookmarks over, I just wanted to share my solution.
While I am very hopeful that Delicious does come out of this a better company, I am concerned for them as the reason I held off ever subscribing to Evernote was because I had Delicious there – I suspect many other people have made a similar decision as well.
I should also mention that Delicious is free to use. Evernote has both a free and a paid service available. I suspect a new version of Delicious will also have a tiered pricing component to it should the company make it that far.