While very many media outlets support del.icio.us in their bookmarking and social media strategies, there has been very little innovation in the del.icio.us social bookmarking platform — this has been a major problem with properties that have been acquired by big firms such as AOL, Google, and Yahoo!, in the case of del.icio.us. Allen Stern wrote a very insightful post, Did Delicious Lose Its Chance To Be FriendFeed?, about how FriendFeed has started to take del.icio.us’ lunch based on innovation and creativity:
[…]Had Delicious (and Yahoo) moved faster on the release could they have become what’s hot with FriendFeed today? I get that FriendFeed allows you to share your delicious bookmarks. But what I am talking about here is something much bigger strategically. By “sitting” on the release, the team lost their chance to move the strategy forward.
[…]Had Yahoo wanted to actually take their Delicious investment and do something with it, how hard would it have been to add the same functionality? If we look back a year, Delicious had a much larger “buzz share” than they do today. When I look at the CN logs, we rarely see any traffic from Delicious and haven’t had a frontpage link in probably nine months. Yet in the last week, I’ve seen way more traffic from FriendFeed. Yahoo’s Delicious service has a “close to mainstream” userbase and sure missed a golden opportunity to move forward - a fail whale if you will.
[…]If you look at the topic I’ve discussed here, it’s basically what Fred Wilson discussed when he wrote about stagnation when companies acquire startups. Who will come up next and displace Upcoming and/or Flickr as the techies choice?
Oh, and be sure to join me on FriendFeed as well as del.icio.us!
Comments (3)
I think this is certainly always a risk with acquisition. The problem can arise when visionaries depart (the acquired company) or the purchaser hasn’t got clear plans to execute, or indeed has to focus elsewhere due to competing business imperatives. Acquisition can also be about neutralisation or ‘capturing’ of a new user-base. Sometimes those have less than wonderful results. Some companies are excellent at this and some fall short. I’m watching with great interest what Nokia do with Plazes and on a slight tangent what Microsoft do with Powerset.
Let’s hope it’s something interesting!
I don’t think del.icio.us’ problems are due to acquisition directly. They’re probably the best example of how acquisition didn’t change the site (compare to flickr, where I need to have a yahoo! login as well as a flickr one).
Their bigger problems were related to
a) not meeting expectations (remember the screen caps for del.icio.us2.0?)
b) not embracing ‘conversational tactics’.
I still use del.icio.us for my own reference, but if I want to engage and share and learn, I use other services.
Andrea Hill » I think the entire problem is that acquisition didn’t change the site. Actually, I don’t remember the screen caps for del.icio.us2.0, so I am going to have to look at those. And yes, they have not embraced conversational tactics, which is what has ALWAYS made bookmark sites fun, from back in the day of Slashdotting, wherein the comments ruled, and one could accrue karma and become a God of Slashdot. Same with Fark and digg and reddit and down the line…
Mind you, all of my personal web bookmarks are saved to my del.icio.us account so I am a heavy-user…