Apparently Delicious is shutting down. This is either not news to you, because you've been hearing people natter on about it for days, or you don't have a clue what Delicious is. Which is more likely, because it's probably being shut down for under-use, which means most people don't have a clue. Right. It's a website that allows you to post links "bookmarks" and then tag them, and then search for new links based on tag, with everyone's links so you can discover whats happening based on what everyone is posting and tagging with what. Nifty idea. It's also worth pointing out that Delicious was one of the first big web 2.0 startups, and got to the whole idea of the social web pretty early.
Anyway, enough history, and on to the news of the day.
tofu said "with all of this talk of delicious, I am surprised that I have heard little about creating a decentralized social bookmark alternative" which is a good thought and echo's a slightly more complex proposal that marn made on the topic the other day.
In short, leaders of the contemporary revolution in federated network technology ("web services should be federated and exportable so that everyone's data doesn't get hosed when one website closes down, and people can share data with friends who uses different services") are saying "let's not make this mistake again, if we're going to build an alternative, let's make it better."
And I think, in typical me-fashion, I'm saying: is social bookmarking still a thing? Have twitter and identi.ca replaced our need for this kind of service? The problem I think lays in the fact that there's so much Internet that services like delicious very quickly become "lets catalog everything" and as a result "bookmarking" as a concept isn't very useful for sharing links and exposing information to new audiences.
Having said that, I think the notion of writing a tool to use identi.ca or a status.net installation to replace delicious functionality seems like a great idea. Similarly, while it's not federated pinboard.in has been around for a while and while it's not federated, (or open source, particularly,) I like just about everything they've done.
Ponder that!