"Yahoo! blocks all automated extraction of data from Delicious. The company apparently is going to let this unique cross between a museum, a library and a crazy old collector's attic burn to the ground. I'd like to take a few things with me before that happens, please."

Joseph Menn: "Delicious was also a social system ahead of its time–and that gives a glimpse of how much opportunity in the area Yahoo squandered. Users tagged stories on the web with keywords that seemed to fit, then could search on those keywords to see what others found most relevant on the topic."

"Yahoo! announced internally today that it is closing down Delicious. It's a loss not just for the many people who used Delicious to archive links of interest to them around the web, it's a loss for the future - for what could have been. Five years later, people are just beginning to appreciate the value of passively published user activity data made available for analysis, personalization and more. That could have been you, Delicious."

Like I said in my talk to City University students a few weeks ago -- never trust a third-party service to be around forever.