Last night, we pushed an upgrade to our Firefox extension via addons.mozilla.org. Because we tweaked and improved lots of things, upgrading triggers a full download of your bookmarks from del.icio.us. Normally this process takes seconds and is practically invisible but the load on our servers were much greater than we expected and they melted as a result.
We’ve unmelted the servers so those of you with missing bookmarks in your del.icio.us Bookmarks extension should be seeing them soon, as the issue will resolve itself. If you need immediate access to your bookmarks, go to Tools -> Options in Firefox, click the del.icio.us tab, and click “Sync Now”. Otherwise, our servers and I would appreciate it if you waited, it should take no more than a few minutes for your extension to automatically grab your bookmarks now that we are up again.
Thanks for your patience and sorry about any problems this may have caused.
Nick Nguyen
Product Manager, del.icio.us
February 21st, 2007
We’ve been busy: since our announcement in september of our millionth signup, another half-million users have joined the fun. And because of this, we’ve been more quiet then I would like, and I want to apologize.
It feels that we’ve spent almost all of our time uncomfortably bursting at the seams; we’ve always been at pretty much close to capacity. We’ve worked very hard to keep the system as stable as possible and as fast as possible in that time. However, I feel that during this very exciting time for the team I’ve personally had less capacity for talking more openly to the delicious community about what’s been going on. Given that we’ve undergone a lot of changes and have a lot more in store in the future, I want to resolve to be better about communicating.
For starters, even though it feels like we’ve been doing less feature work, we still have been doing weekly releases to improve performance (the new Firefox extension gets a new revision every few days it seems). Going forward, we’re going to be talking much more about what’s changed, where the bugs are, and in general, more explicit about what we’re doing.
While we’ve done some integration work with Yahoo, it’s now time to do more meaningful joint development work to take advantage of all the great technology that a company that does one hojillion hits a day has at its disposal. Doing this is pretty involved, and we’re going to take the opportunity to redo things like the UI and fix many of the less-beloved historical design quirks that still linger from my original implementation. Doing such large changes in the dark is, I think, a huge mistake, and I want to try to have a phased rollout so that everyone can get comfortable as we figure out what the future product looks like.
Late last year, our team was joined by Abe’s team, whose previous project was the backend for the new Yahoo Photos and MyWeb 1 before that. These guys know scalability like nobody’s business. On the front-end, we’ve been joined by Erik and his team of all-around asskickers. And Patrick has built a team to develop a new set of browser plugins that allow for much deeper browser integration. I have high hopes that our expanded team will be able to release a new and tastier delicious someday in the not-too distant future.
We’ve still got many questions to answer — Commas or spaces? In what way should we allow logins from Yahoo!? How should a next-generation API work? Should we do something about the dots in the name? and many more, and I look forward to figuring these things out with you in the future.
Here’s to a new year and a lot more conversation.
Joshua
February 1st, 2007
