Delicious: Past, Present and Future
Delicious, or del.icio.us as it used to be, was founded in 2003 by Jason Schachter. After growing in popularity relatively fast, it was purchased by Yahoo! in 2005.
For the following 3 years, nothing really changed at Delicious and it quickly became known more as a sensible bookmarking service than anything particularly cutting edge. Shadowed by the growth of Digg and the popularity of Twitter and Facebook, it was almost forgotten.
Then a few things happened.
First off, at the end of June 2008 an unhappy Schachter left Yahoo! due in part to the stalling of any forward progress for Delicious within Yahoo!. He was later hired by Google. Once gone, he revealed how disappointed he was with the whole experience:
“I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.” — Ycombinator
Immediately after Schachter’s departure, in August 2008, Delicious was relaunched to some pretty positive feedback. It felt a bit like welcoming back a friend who’d been missing for 3 years. The new site was faster, cleaner and more intuitive than the old, allowing people to share bookmarks with each other and set up networks of friends within the site.
Its popularity as a bookmarking tool continued to grow, but the social features of the site were generally ignored in the face of much more exciting progress elsewhere, like Digg, StumbleUpon’s changes and the explosion of Twitter and Facebook. Techcrunch put it brilliantly: “it [was] where links go to die.”
Fast-forward about a year and an excited post from Mashable started rumors of quite a few cool Delicious updates to come:
- Fresh Bookmarks – this was the big new feature that bumped ‘Popular Bookmarks’ off the front page. The idea was to allow newly popular content to reach more users more quickly, using Tweets and bookmarks as indicators. For marketers, this made Delicious more useful as a site to spread viral content- a bit more like Digg, reddit and Twitter.
- Shareability - wrapped up in this new feature were better sharing tools. When you bookmark something, you are now presented with the option to Tweet and email it as well
- Search - the internal search became a lot more powerful and useful, particularly for heavy users of the site.
The purpose of these updates was obviously to bring Delicious into the real-time arena. Instead of just storing links, the service was now a potential space for hosting the conversation around that content.
The most interesting reaction to these updates came from Schachter himself:
Mashable focused on the Search updates, describing the new filters as “sophisticated [and] user-friendly”. For marketers, the ability to dig deeper into seasonality, trends and what’s worked well for different sites in the past was particularly useful.
What’s Happening Right Now?
2010 has seen a few more updates that seek to satisfy requests from users. For example, you can now view just private or just public bookmarks, and there is greater choice and functionality when it comes to sharing content.
SearchEngineWatch made the observation that the new ‘browse my bookmarks’ feature moves Delicious even closer to the Stumble Upon model and questions whether this will be extended in the future to a general ‘browse bookmarks’ capability.
In the update release notes on the Delicious blog, the team asks for feedback on this particular new feature as well as mentioning that plans for 2010 include introducing the “ability to look up and connect to other friends that use Delicious”.
Time will tell whether Delicious’ updates help the service move from being the bookmarking tool of choice to something more social. The competition is certainly fierce and, although Delicious has a wide and loyal user base, they might have missed the boat.
GE Sponsors Digg’s Entire Health Section
Digg is one of the first social media communities to really take sponsorships and advertising to the next level. They were the first to allow users to rate ads shown on the site, have sponsorships for events like Digg Dialoggs, and even combined banner and background campaigns targeted to specific categories or submissions.
If you happen to browse through the Health section on Digg, you will see what has to be their most complete sponsorship to date… and based on how much the users hated the Dragon Age ads that took over the page, these ads are done quite well.
I first heard of GE’s health initiative when I saw an article off Better Homes & Gardens that was shared on Twitter, but was reminded of it today when the social sharing buttons on a Digg submission had a been sponsored by GE offering to let me ’share this Healthy idea’.
Clean, non-intrusive or annoying, the click-able banner takes you to a pretty cool landing page off HealthyMagination, which is GE’s attempt to help people become healthier ‘through the sharing of imaginative ideas and proven solutions’ by helping gather, share and discuss healthy ideas.
The landing page showcases the most recent health related content from GE’s various partners and the amount of shares the article has received.
GE’s sponsorship of Digg includes the entire Health section including the Section title, top 728×90 leaderboard, the top 300×250 sidebar ad on all Health pages as well.
I have to say I am rather impressed with GE and their use of social media, not just Digg, to promote their initiative.
Google Gets Into the Social Game with Google Buzz
Did anyone else see the news about Google Buzz and feel a massive sense of closure? The lack of a comprehensive social networking tool always felt like a huge hole in Google’s armoury, but it was only a matter of time before they entered the arena.
Rumours were flying round the web earlier this week about the launch of a new product. The Wall Street Journal reported on a new tool for gmail, and then Mashable posted excitedly about an invite to Google HQ.
So, What’s The Deal?
Google Buzz was launched on the 9th of February at a private event in Google HQ. Bradley Horowitz, VP for Product Management, announced the new tool and talked about humanity’s desire to share in a real time environment.
The Elevator Pitch:
It’s an aggregator and sharing tool that sits right inside your mobile and gmail. There are loads more details about the service below the fold in this Mashable article, but as with many similar tools, it’s much easier to see them in practice than read about them.
And for a social media marketer? It’s quite possibly a dream come true…
Are People Actually Going To Use It?
As opposed to other social networks that require you to take an initial action to join and then regular action to upkeep your account, Google Buzz will sit right inside a product that you’re probably already addicted to. I imagine that avoiding Buzz will be like trying to ignore the Superbowl commercials.
For marketers, this will probably mean an unprecedented rate of adoption across a whole new kind of audience. Gmail has a huge reach and it’s growing more rapidly than any other mail client. Because of this new audience, viral content could become an even more irresistible investment for a lot of companies.
I also find it hard to believe that Google won’t somehow integrate what’s ‘Buzzing’ into its ever-updating search results page. This could go someway towards negating the problem of links, followed or otherwise, on the social web.
Who Cares?
You mean apart from everyone? As you’d expect, Mashable have had pretty good coverage and wasted no time setting up their own Buzz account.
Unsurprisingly, this launch has also brought out responses and attacks from competitors. Microsoft and Yahoo have both had something to say:
“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr (Flickr), Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”
Ouch. Yahoo was a bit less confrontational. It opted for the gently-gently approach of reminding everyone about Yahoo’s existing social features:
“There are now more than 200 Yahoo! and third-party sites that feed into Yahoo! Updates – like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube (YouTube), Yelp and Yahoo! Buzz – allowing people to see and share updates such as when they’ve uploaded photos, changed their status, buzzed up a news story or posted a new restaurant review, all from Yahoo!”
Wait, What About Google Wave?!
The relatively recent launch of Google Wave had set me slightly on edge. Yes, collaboration is important, but the product just didn’t set me on fire the way I would’ve hoped. It’s hard to tell so soon after Buzz’s launch, but the noise around this product seems to be a lot more encouraging. Its up-close-and-personal integration with Gmail hopefully means it’ll appeal to the ‘average user’ more than the collaborative complexities of Google Wave.
Even if Google Buzz isn’t perfect right out the box, I don’t think Google’s going to let this one go easily. They have a solid track-history of refining and improving products according to the feedback of fans and users and their online presence reflects that; they’ll work and work until Google Buzz becomes irresistible.
Google Buzz is like the final bit of the jigsaw. And the picture it depicts? Total web dominance.
Guest post by Lucy Langdon, who writes about online marketing and environmental issues.
Imgur: Stolen Content and Social Media’s Double Standard
For those of you living under a rock, Imgur is a site that allows users to upload and share images very quickly and easily.
It’s grown massively in popularity over the last 6 months and has left similar services in the dust.
It was created by Reddit user, MrGrim (Alan Scaaf), for other Redditors and this is one of the reasons why it gained popularity so quickly on the site. For a while, Imgur use was actually recommended in the ‘pic’ reddit’s description. However, Imgur’s popularity isn’t limited to reddit; if you’re a social media user, then you will have seen Imgur uploads on the front page of your chosen network many times.
But here’s the problem: the majority of the images uploaded to Imgur are stolen from elsewhere. There is zero policing and all uploads are anonymous, which means that great pictures from across the web are scraped and uploaded as ‘genuine’ content all the time. Sometimes the pictures are even scraped by users after they are submitted to a social site, and then resubmitted and pushed in that same site.
Pretty annoying if your specialty is, for example, photo-blogging or based on images.
Imgur’s inability to police it’s site and stop copyrighted pictures from being uploaded would be a lot less serious if the social media sites didn’t commit the same indiscretion. In fact, the opposite seems to happen. For various reasons listed below, social media sites and their users strongly favor Imgur, often times over the image owner’s site.
So what is it about Imgur that makes social media sites go all warm and fuzzy inside?
- users LOVE it. Why? It’s fast and easy. It also has an authority on social media sites which means an image submitted on Imgur can sometimes go hot faster than an image hosted on another site. For some users, the fact that Imgur strips all meta data in the upload process is also an advantage.
- in reddit’s case, the tunnel goes a little deeper… Imgur was created by a redditor, a site that notoriously ‘looks after its own’. As mentioned, the /pics subreddit at one point requested that you use Imgur to submit images (and, even without the requirement, it’s rare to see a non-imgur picture do well in r/pics). Some users actually link to the info page on Imgur rather than the image directly so that Schaaf gets more ad revenue from the visits.
Edit: Reddit comments to this post can be found here, further expressing the concern I mentioned above – http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/azhwx/imgur_stolen_content_and_social_medias_double/.
Now, I don’t hate Imgur; in fact, I wish more sites were as user-friendly. Reading this interview with the creator of the site, Alan Schaaf, it seems his intentions were good enough to begin with. However, it’s clear that what started out as a simple tool for Redditors has become a bit of a pest and Imgur, as a middle-man that profits from having more pinched material than original, should be thinking about how to combat the issue.
Even more importantly, the social sites that allow Imgur to run amok over their homepages should think about how heavily they come down on other sites or resources that break the rules of etiquette or TOS. Quite simply, if another site were to do the same they’d be banned in a heartbeat.
In Digg and Reddit’s case, a lot of the content submitted to the site via Imgur explicitely breaks their Terms of Use:
“Digg respects the intellectual property of others. It is Digg’s policy to respond expeditiously to claims of copyright and other intellectual property infringement.” –Digg.com
“Service Provider respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same. Service Provider may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, suspend or terminate the access of and take other action against users, subscribers, registrants and account holders who infringe the copyright rights of others.” –Reddit.com
The social sites themselves might point to YouTube and other user driven sites as an example of why they cannot justify banning or taking action against Imgur, but many of those same sites, including YouTube, have mechanisms in place to prevent copyright material from being uploaded and used. Unfortunately Imgur has no mechanism to prevent this type of abuse.
In a nutshell, the situation is frustrating for many content owners and a clear double standard on the social media site’s part.
If I were to scrape and host an image, and then submit it to a social media site, I would be either banned or voted down in a second. However, since Imgur is a site made by a social media user and fellow San Franciscan, then it gets a sort of pass that other sites do not get.
Maybe someone should consider funding Alan Schaaf and Imgur, to help clean it up and get it back to being a positive tool for people to use, instead of the content stealing engine it is today.
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About Brent Csutoras
Brent Csutoras is an Internet Marketing Consultant who specializes in Social Media, Viral linkbait and Search Engine Marketing.
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