After giving millions of users a good 24 hours to express their anger and frustration at wide reports of a plan to kill off web bookmarking service Delicious, Yahoo got around to explaining that there was no need to panic.
A leaked internal presentation had showed on Thursday that Yahoo was planning to “sunset” some services, including Delicious, and Yahoo statements to the press that it was “cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products” encouraged the idea that this meant Delicious was doomed.On Friday, Yahoo said something new: “We are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company”, officials wrote on Friday on the Delicious home blog. The service will stay up as Yahoo talks to potential buyers.
Perhaps the company changed plans after a torrent of criticism. But in saying it was “very disappointed” in the press reports, Yahoo implied that it had intended to save Delicious (and its scads of user bookmarks) all along.
If that’s true, Yahoo leadership still has a lot to learn about the internet.
It’s been said for years that a day is an eternity in the internet news cycle. With Twitter, a day is now several eternities. Not only were Delicious users bashing Yahoo’s reported decision for all to see, they were actively and publicly swapping recommendations for new services and directions on how to move bookmarks there. Many who acted on that advice will not be inclined to return.
I and others in the mainstream press and the blogosphere gave Yahoo a clear shot on Thursday to respond to the leaked evidence that it would “sunset” Delicious, and it chose neither to dispute nor to clarify the implication that the operation was doomed.
The best-case scenario, then, is that the company is so weak-willed that it changed its mind in a day–and won’t admit it was wrong the first time.
It would be even worse if Yahoo never planned to killed to Delicious and out of a hopeless preference for secrecy couldn’t manage to get that across for a day. If so, one wonders if among the 4 per cent of Yahoo staff fired this week were some with a better grasp of how their chosen medium works.
