Pulp Tech

Violet Blue

AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

By Violet Blue | September 28, 2011, 3:50pm PDT

Summary: Link sharing site Delicious re-launched on Monday with unwanted changes, huge technical problems, and a lesson in how to kill a beloved product.

The re-launch of social link sharing site Delicious, now under the stewardship of YouTube founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley under their AVOS startup banner, is nothing short of a complete, mind-boggling disaster.

How AVOS took a beloved social sharing site and ruined it from stem to stern, and up to this minute have a complete, angry user PR explosion on their hands, is as enlightening as it is hard to watch.

In April I highlighted concerns about Delicious’ new Terms and Privacy Policy that users were being forced to opt-in to.

Why You Should Think Twice About Opting-In to the Delicious-AVOS Transfer explained that the new policies had the potential to seriously change the service. I underestimated what was coming.

When AVOS rolled out the new Delicious yesterday, I think we can begin to guess as to why AVOS would not respond to my request for comment on the issues.

Delicious basically rolled out on day one as a broken product.

Conveniently, AVOS removed the support forums so no one could ask questions or find answers.

But don’t let that stop you from watching the tragicomic PR meltdown on Delicious’ Twitter feed and Facebook page. Their Twitter is filled with dozens of public “Try resetting your password again, it should be fixed now” @ reply responses. The Facebook page is a jaw-dropping lesson in pissing off your users and watching them leave in droves.

The new Delicious is essentially doing away with one of the main things the site was great for: tagging and organizing by tags.

Delicious came up with the interesting but seriously misguided idea of forcing users to now categorize and share by using “stacks” - among many other forced changes.

Among the required changes is disallowing users to use the service with their previous handles, and making everyone use a “real name” policy. Let’s just ignore all those valid issues for our users, shall we? Yes, because that has turned out so well for Google Plus, and we all know how happy everyone is with that.

Incidentally, don’t give me that “but the Real Name thing doesn’t matter because now Google+ is so successful because it’s got millions of users” crap. Google is too big to fail, doesn’t need to keep its users happy, doesn’t need to make investors happy, and already had its target market’s email addresses out the starting gate.

Postcards From The Bubble: How To Ruin A Great Site

They changed the site dramatically and gave users no warning to make a contingency plan, then launched the new version with a laundry list of broken tools and an astonishing scroll of things they’re “working on.”

Most people are reporting that the plugins are either broken or not compatible - including the most recent versions made by AVOS. The accrued bookmarks and tags are all still tucked away on Delicious’ site, but can’t be accessed by the plugin at all.

On launch day, the amount of people timing out while trying to log in was sadly impressive. As I write this, I get a 502 when checking the delicious.com link.

The RSS feeds were broken, the password reset was broken, browser extensions are still broken, tag bundles are gone (users put a lot of work into these), search by date is gone and search returns are not chronological, users are now unable to edit their tags…

The functionality of the site is gone. I have to wonder, did anyone at AVOS actually use Delicious?

I’m not the only one asking this question.

What’s worse, in the new Delicious blog post The First 20 Hours users are told,

If you’re not seeing all your bookmarks right now, it’s because we made a late decision to limit the amount of data we initially transferred from Yahoo!. We’ll be restoring all the data into your profile in the coming weeks. We should have made this limitation clearer to everyone from the outset, and I want to apologize for any headaches it has caused or will cause.

…Which explains why people are posting angrily on Delicious’ Facebook page today that their bookmarks and tags were returning as error messages.

I really didn’t think it was possible to screw up a new version this much. I think it’s an object lesson straight outta the bubble.

Delicious was a wildly popular social link sharing site, and its fan base was a study in long-tail loyalty.

When Delicious sold to Yahoo! it languished unattended, like many great startups - with the general consensus being that big-box corporate companies that acquire great little startups are essentially clueless about what made them great.

We are not surprised when monocultures like Yahoo! pull a herp-derp on things that make the internet fun; we just cross our fingers for luck (and our legs regarding the new Privacy Policies) and hope they don’t screw it up or kill it.

We know - we know - they are not going to take the time to find the bits that made it sing and hum and make those parts better. We know that on a basic animal level that they don’t get it.

And we hurl a curse in the direction of the chump that sold out something we liked and used and made our lives a wee bit happier, while understanding that we all have to pay rent.

We also know there’s got to be a better way.

When Yahoo! got caught with its finger on the trigger to kill Delicious, an amazing cry came up from the internets to save it. Then AVOS rode in on a white unicorn to save it. Yay!

But, no. What we got was our worst fears about the bubble, confirmed.

Delicious is a bitter lesson for everyone. It’s the difference between how people actually use a product versus how rich, out-of-touch knuckleheads think people should be using that product, all to further their own self-interests.

If you make a startup we like, such as Delicious: please don’t sell it.

And if you do, and it ends up like this, mangled by carpetbaggers - screw you guys. Seriously.

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Topics

YouTube Inc., Founder, Startup Banner, Violet Blue, Yahoo, AVOS, Delicious, Social Sharing, Startups, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Tech Bubble, Silicon Valley, YouTube

Violet Blue is a Forbes Web Celeb, SF Appeal contributor, a high-profile tech personality and one of Wired's Faces of Innovation.

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RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

I'm sure the new Delicious will be delicious once we all get used to it and the bugs are ironed out (am only saying that cause it seems to be the way it goes with these things). And I really, really hope my links that appear to be lost are found again. (Please!) A bit off track but in hindsight, I wish there'd been a way I could have created a Delicious Pro account. Maybe a little cash revenue might have kept it the way users want it. I pay $24 per annum for Flickr, I'd probably pay for Delicious too if it were reliable and did what I wanted it to do.
leesawatego
about 1 day ago
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RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

@leesawatego I don't know - this was one of the most careless things I've seen with a significant site in a long time. I'm really worried about the privacy issues now.

But I think you hit the nail on the head with he idea of a premium service. I think most people will pay *something* to know they will get exactly what they want and to be able to have a trust of service with a company. Especially when users put so much time and investment into the site.
violetblue
about 1 day ago
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Like Lady Gaga bought the Library of Congress

@leesawatego I honestly don't think so.

If Lady Gaga just bought the Library of Congress and she is determined to bring it to "mainstream", what would you expect to see?

I think the youtube founders are very capable but because they don't use delicious themselves. They *will* take delicious to the direction they are more familiar with, which may not be the one existing delicious users would be mostly happy with.

I have written a blog post on this if you feel like reading more:
http://blog.trunk.ly/2011/09/29/like-lady-gaga-bought-the-library-of-congress-why-new-delicious-fail/

Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of trunk.ly, a competitor to delicious. But hey, I'm also a long time user of delicious too.
alexdong
about 1 day ago
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- Flagged
RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

I wonder which of the phony reasons for demanding to see some ID over at Google+ will turn up at Delicious. Or will we be treated to a new variety of "we're only trying to help" bovine excrement?
Anon4fun
about 1 day ago
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RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

I'm not surprised that Yahoo couldn't figure out what to do with Delicious
Yahoo! can't even work out how to make a decent web mail program.

Every "improvement" to their web mail has made it more difficult to use.
You can't even attach anything to an email, without inviting every cyber-criminal in the world into your PC (i.e. you must run multiple js routines and Flash).

It sounds like AVOS isn't any better.
lehnerus2000
about 1 day ago
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RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

For me the deletion of the support forums is the straw that broke the camel's back. It reeks of pre-emptive damage control--even BEFORE the release I bet they knew they had a stinker on their hands.

Amazing. The Founders of YouTube and yet they seemed to know nothing about proper QA testing, little about proper market research for their new venture, and the wrong damn things about P.R and promotion. Just this statement in their blog is frightening:

"Delicious is in back to beta mode"

Note this isn't referring to some test version of the product running side-by-side with the old service . This is referring to the released version--the ONLY version anyone can access. With no "opt out" choice to retain the old version while the new one is tested (only an "opt in" to get any version of Delicious at all, albeit a badly broken one).

What a bunch of bozos. Total amateur hour.
Snark Shark
about 1 day ago
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RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

I never liked the look/feel of the old Delicious so never used it; read a report this morning reporting on the changes and thought it sounded great and headed back. Got a brief glimpse of the new look/feel, liked it, signed up, got a message to say there was a problem, and now it looks like the old Delicious again...!
marktharparms
about 1 day ago
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RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

The chump has said publicly, of the sale of Delicious to Yahoo:

"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." -- Joshua Schachter

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754339

I understand your anguish here, because you invest a lot of energy and time into the website and have no control over it. But, don't think that it's a matter of the site creator selling you out. He did what he thought would be best, not just for himself, but for everyone that used the site.
flipzagging
20 hrs ago
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RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

Little harsh article. Launches for new websites often go nuts. You tube was a ****** site when it first launched. They went through growing pains where we saw "buffering" all the time but they fixed it. Now it kicks ass.

Just give it a few months, let the kinks work out. Having a startup that launches with over 1MM users on the onset is unheard of.

Want to criticize a website go after yahoo. After being on a high in 2006 and far ahead of their time, their properties are falling apart and bugs aplenty. Who even uses yahoo anymore?
foobardude
20 hrs ago
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RE: AVOS' Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure

@foobardude

I think the point is that Delicious was not a new site. There is an old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Obviously not heeded this time.
bargeemike
6 hrs ago
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