OK, kidding aside, the sale of delicio.us to Yahoo and the sale of Myspace to Rupert Murdoch both really suck. Selling delicio.us (a system for pooling intriguing links that fosters communities and subcommunities of interest) seems especially painful since that's a very tech-savvy, web-savvy group--focused in their lack of focus, or multiple foci. I know next to nothing about Joshua Schachter, the founder, but is it right that he should personally profit from the sweat and passion of hundreds of folks who thought they were part of a community, as opposed to being part of some venture capitalist's or cool hunter's wet dream? I trust he will be sending checks to all the geeks who put him in clover--yeah, right. Yes, I know bandwidth and storage cost money and no one should be forced to be a benefactor, but seriously--that's a group effort. Maybe Schachter's going to give all the money to Katrina victims. If there's any altruism involved with the sale, please let me know.
Hi, Tom. It takes a huge amount of resources to host a site like that, and they don't charge any fees, or have ads. I don't think it's realistic to expect something like that to support the number of people now using it as a feel-good freebie thing.
Disclosure: I did a few weeks of consulting for them this year.
"They don't charge any fees, or have ads."
Yet.
I'm not suggesting it should be free, I'm suggesting maybe the owner should have told all the elves who were doing all the content-generating for him that the party was about to be over unless they kicked in fees or made voluntary contributions. I don't know, did he give anybody any warning he was about to "sell out"?
The blog (http://blog.del.icio.us/) mentioned that they were looking for investors in May. Before this year it was a side project and Joshua had a "day job" that paid for all of the hardware and tech help.
Well, there's investors and then there's Yahoo taking over. I also realize people who put a lot of time into the thing (as users) should be aware by now that there's no Santa Claus on the Net and maybe shouldn't have sunk too many hours into it of they didn't want all their diligent linking to wind up in some holdng company's portfolio. I don't even know why I care, since I never signed up. I guess as a consumer of delicio.us (and the recipient of links from there) I liked that it was pure and hate to see that end. There's a lot of good energy on that site, pardon me if I go all new age.
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OK, kidding aside, the sale of delicio.us to Yahoo and the sale of Myspace to Rupert Murdoch both really suck. Selling delicio.us (a system for pooling intriguing links that fosters communities and subcommunities of interest) seems especially painful since that's a very tech-savvy, web-savvy group--focused in their lack of focus, or multiple foci. I know next to nothing about Joshua Schachter, the founder, but is it right that he should personally profit from the sweat and passion of hundreds of folks who thought they were part of a community, as opposed to being part of some venture capitalist's or cool hunter's wet dream? I trust he will be sending checks to all the geeks who put him in clover--yeah, right. Yes, I know bandwidth and storage cost money and no one should be forced to be a benefactor, but seriously--that's a group effort. Maybe Schachter's going to give all the money to Katrina victims. If there's any altruism involved with the sale, please let me know.
- tom moody 12-13-2005 5:08 am
Hi, Tom. It takes a huge amount of resources to host a site like that, and they don't charge any fees, or have ads. I don't think it's realistic to expect something like that to support the number of people now using it as a feel-good freebie thing.
Disclosure: I did a few weeks of consulting for them this year.
- barry (bloggy.com) (guest) 12-14-2005 11:41 pm
"They don't charge any fees, or have ads."
Yet.
I'm not suggesting it should be free, I'm suggesting maybe the owner should have told all the elves who were doing all the content-generating for him that the party was about to be over unless they kicked in fees or made voluntary contributions. I don't know, did he give anybody any warning he was about to "sell out"?
- tom moody 12-14-2005 11:58 pm
The blog (http://blog.del.icio.us/) mentioned that they were looking for investors in May. Before this year it was a side project and Joshua had a "day job" that paid for all of the hardware and tech help.
- barry (bloggy.com) (guest) 12-15-2005 12:26 am
Well, there's investors and then there's Yahoo taking over. I also realize people who put a lot of time into the thing (as users) should be aware by now that there's no Santa Claus on the Net and maybe shouldn't have sunk too many hours into it of they didn't want all their diligent linking to wind up in some holdng company's portfolio. I don't even know why I care, since I never signed up. I guess as a consumer of delicio.us (and the recipient of links from there) I liked that it was pure and hate to see that end. There's a lot of good energy on that site, pardon me if I go all new age.
- tom moody 12-15-2005 1:00 am