What we can learn from Delicious about Services In The Cloud

1. A Delicious Tale
What the story of Del.icio.us can teach us about Cloud Applications.

2. Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away

4. Steve Schachter started one of the earliest
blogs on the web, called Memepool in 1998.
Schacter used the Memepool link database
as the foundation for a stand-alone
bookmark website called del.icio.us, released
in 2003.
He left his day job to work full time on
del.icio.us in April 2005. By December
2005, del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo…

7. • Delicious introduced the term “Social
Bookmarking”
• Not the first online, collaborative bookmark
service – but the most successful
• ASP – Application Service Provider
• SaaS – Software as a Service
• Cloud Application
• ! Cloud Hosting

8. • Dec 16 – Yahoo Slide leaked
• Delicious listed as a service to be “Sunset”
• Dec 17 – Yahoo “clarifies” – they intend to sell
Delicious

10. • I use Delicious – a lot
• I use it at a link repository
• I generate auto-posts from it
• I use it as a “Filtered Browser History”
• The news that Delicious was being Sunset was
huge for me – and made me very worried
• What To Do? Find a Replacement

15. • Moving to Diigo was painless
• Why was this so easy?
– Delicious has an API and speaks in friendly data
dialects like RSS, JSON and ATOM
– Diigo has a Delicious import tool
– The functionality of social bookmarking has a field
of many competitors

18. Living the Cloud City Dream
•You own your data
•You can take your data
•Friendly API to get data
•Lots of competitors
•Available self-hosting

21. Living the Cloud City Nightmare
•They own your data
•You are locked into their
system
•No API or Non-Useful API
•No options if they change
their service and you don’t
like it

22. • Cloud Applications help by being Cheap and
Web Accessible
• Cloud Applications eliminate updating or
patching software (for you)
• Cloud Applications can be A Trap and hold
your data hostage
• Cloud Applications need to be robust and
resilient to ensure they are available