Delicious Shutting Down: How To Save Your Bookmarks

Seeing the rumors today that Delicious may be shut down by Yahoo makes me want to vomit. Ok, that's sugar-coating it a little, but you get the idea. And it's now been confirmed by Liz Gannes that the social bookmarking site that lead the “Web 2.0” movement with its open sharing infrastructure is going to shut down. I have been using the service since 2005 or so and have thousands of bookmarks. Some are just reminders while others are for more routine behaviors like checking certain news sites.

So, it's time to save your links. Here are a few ways to export and save your Delicious bookmarks:

1. Use the Delicious export tool – https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export
2. Use command line prompts to export your bookmarks. Visit the following URL:  https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml to get the bookmarks as bookmarks.xml – then you can put them in a spreadsheet.
3. Backupify offers a way to back up your bookmarks as well as a number of other services. Check out the details here.
4. Pinboard.in offers clean version of Delicious which was created and run by one of the original Delicious creators.
5. You could import all of your Delicious bookmarks into Aol Favorites, but given the lack of priority on the product since I worked on it years ago, it could be a risk. Or you could try Digg but there has been uncertainty and changes over the past few months there too. It may be more wise to give StumbleUpon a try – Garrett Camp and team are doing good things.

The #SaveDelicious Twitter hashtag and username @SaveDelicious has already taken rise and there is even an Act.ly petition to save the product. We'd love to see Delicious saved. Or if Yahoo is looking to sunset it, why not sell it to Google, Facebook, Microsoft or event Aol who could redesign it as a “what's hot” on the Web type of content play. Regardless, this move scares me because if Yahoo is willing to shut down Delicious they also could be looking to do similar things to other products they own like the photo sharing site Flickr. With over 16,000 photos saved on Flickr, I may need to take action and start moving them if Delicious truly is toast.