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After acquisition, Pinboard will shutter social bookmarking site Delicious

After acquisition, Pinboard will shutter social bookmarking site Delicious

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‘Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard’

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After changing hands five times since it was founded in 2003, social bookmarking site Delicious has reached its end. Last week, rival company Pinboard announced that it had acquired the beleaguered site, and that it would be shutting it down as of June 15th.

For a couple of years, Delicious was one of those sites that internet users relied on. Designed to store and share bookmarks, it allowed them to build up a collection of bookmarks that they could access from anywhere. Following its acquisition, Delicious will become a read-only site on June 15th: users won’t be able to save any new bookmarks to the site. The site won’t go away completely: users will still be able to use the site to access their collections. Pinboard owner Maciej Cegłowsk encouraged users to migrate their accounts to his site, and noted that a disabled export feature will be reactivated if users want to go elsewhere.

In the release, Cegłowski explains that he purchased the site (reportedly for a measly $35 thousand) because it was a piece of internet history, and because he didn’t want it to “disappear from the web.” He capped off the announcement by saying “Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.”

While the site’s heyday has long since passed, Delicious’ influence will linger: it helped to establish social bookmarking in the earlier days of the web, features which have since been incorporated into a number of other sites, such as Pinboard, Pocket, and Pinterest.