Yesterday now we read on the official Delicious blog that the “YouTube founders acquire Delicious”. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who have founded YouTube and sold it less than two years later to Google have acquired Delicious which will become part of their company AVOS.

A blog post on the Avos company website reveals that they have intentions to improve the site by making it “more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content”. For that, they “plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload”.

Delicious users who log into their account will be greeted with a “Delicious is moving to a new home” message. Users have to agree to transfer their bookmarks, account information and other data to the new company. Account data of users who do not agree to move and who do not log into their account in the migration period will become unavailable around July 2011. This screen is shown on every log in.

Users do have the option to export their bookmarks to a local computer

A FAQ has been put online that addresses several pressing questions. One of the interesting tidbits is that AVOS plans to build a Delicious extension for Firefox 4 and publish it as soon as possible.

It is likely that Delicious will lose a good chunk of its bookmarks, at least the private ones, during the transition period. First from users who once used an account but do not anymore, and from spammers who have auto-created hundreds of thousands of Delicious accounts to place links to their sites on the popular bookmarking service. It is not clear how AVOS will handle public bookmarks of users who have not agreed to move their data.

It feels logical that the company could use those bookmarks in anonymized form on the new Delicious, considering that they have been public all the time.

It seems as if AVOS has every intention to improve Delicious, and it will be interesting to read more about the company’s plans and see them in action on the site.

Other products to be closed include MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious.

AltaVista was launched in 1995 and, for a great many people including myself, was the search engine of choice for many years.  It was set up by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Laboratory.  It was for a while the darling of the web with daily searches starting at 300,000 on launch day to more than 80 million within two years, and that was 1997 when nobody was online yet!

AltaVista became the search provider to Yahoo! in 1996 and was then sold to Compaq.  The dot.com bubble bursting in 2000 hit the company hard and resulted in its eventual sale to Yahoo!

In a statement, Yahoo! said…

“Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”

It will be the closeure of Delicious that will have most people upset though.  All a spokeswoman would say about it is…

“We continue to operate Delicious today, and will communicate specific details when appropriate.”

Update: Delicious has recently been sold by Yahoo. The service continues to be available on the Internet as an effect of that. It is also interesting to note that AltaVista is still operational and accessible as of today.

Other services have indeed been closed down though.

It may sound strange, but the bookmarking service does not offer link validation options. Add to that missing options to verify links when they are added to the service, and it is guaranteed that broken links are becoming a major problem for regular users of the service.

Even worse is the fact that the Delicious staff has decided to block many link checking services from accessing their website. That may have been done to reduce the resource usage of the service. This guide looks at several options to verify links at the social bookmarking service.

Online Link Checkers

Online link checkers are the most comfortable option, as they can check the links of every public Delicious page easily and without additional software or plugins. The problem with this method is that many of the services are blocked by Delicious. It comes down to finding services that are not blocked. It has to be noted that only public links will be checked by the services, which may or may not be problematic. Another, more serious limitation is that only one page can be checked at the same time. Users with dozens or even hundreds of link pages at Delicious would need to verify each page individually.

The following online link checkers can currently be used to check links on delicious: Web Tools, 2bone Link Checker or Megrisoft Link Checker are two that are currently working. Just paste the Delicious url into the form and wait until the service has processed the page. The bad links will be marked, so that they can be identified easily. The last step then is to delete or edit the broken links on Delicious.

The online checkers are the best method for users with only a handful of bookmarks, and those who do not have access to software programs or browser add-ons that can also be used for verifying those links.

Software Link Verifiers

Users with hundreds of saved bookmarks at Delicious can optimize the verification process with software programs. Those programs often can check local and online HTML pages. It is recommended to export all Delicious bookmarks by clicking on Settings > Export / Backup Bookmarks on the Delicious homepage. This saves all bookmarks in a single HTML file on the local system. Software link checkers such as Link Sleuth or Deadlink can be used to verify all links on those exported HTML pages.

check links delicious

The verification looks the following in the Deadlink program. Start the link checker after installation, and select to verify links in an HTML file in the pulldown menu in the header. Now browse to the exported Delicious bookmarks file and load it into the application. A click on the green checkmark icon starts the verification of all bookmarks. It is again necessary to remove or edit any dead links manually at the Delicious website.

The main advantage of software link checkers is that they can process a single HTML file containing all exported bookmarks at once. This optimizes the verification tremendously.

Sync Bookmarks With Web Browsers

The third option makes use of browser add-ons or plugins to sync the Delicious bookmarks with the web browser bookmarks. It is then only necessary to verify the browser bookmarks regularly to eliminate dead links in the bookmarks.

Firefox users can download the official add-on Delicious Bookmarks, Google Chrome users the official Delicious Bookmarks Extension and Internet Explorer users the official Internet Explorer Add-On. All three browser extensions sync the bookmarks with the web browser.

The software programs mentioned in the Software Link Verifiers section of this guide can be used to verify those bookmarks easily.

Verdict:

It is not really clear why there is no official option to check Delicious bookmarks at the official website. One would expect a feature like that from a bookmarking service. Options to export and verify bookmarks with software programs, and to sync bookmarks with web browser bookmarks are probably the two best options to verify Delicious bookmarks on a regular basis.

Have you found another option to verify those bookmarks? Let us know in the comments.

The Delicious team has been hard at work to provide their Google Chrome users with an extension that would offer them the same functionality as their Firefox counterparts.

The Delicious extension for Google Chrome is currently in beta stage which means that not everything that has been integrated into the Firefox add-on is currently also offered in the Chrome extension.

The Delicious extension currently be used to sync the Delicious bookmarks with a Delicious account, display Delicious bookmarks in the address bar of the Chrome browser and to bookmark pages with the help of the Tag button that is being placed in the Chrome toolbar.

A Delicious account is needed to make use of the extension. Bookmark syncing can be enabled in the extension’s options as well so that the bookmarks are always synced between the browser and the Delicious account.

Users who want to read up on the release can visit the Delicious blog post that announces the beta release of the Chrome extension. Those who want to skip the information can head over to the Google Chrome extensions gallery to download the Delicious extension.

Google Unified Search is a very interesting search add-on for the Firefox web browser. You might have read about add-ons that combine Google search results with those of other search engines such as Bing or Wolfram Alpha. Google Unified Search takes that concept a step further by integrating multiple search engines in Google results. It adds support for Bing, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Stumbleupon and Delicious in the Google search results.

Search results of one search engine besides Google Search are displayed at a time but it is possible to switch to the results of another one without having to reload the page. By default Google search results and Bing search results are displayed in the interface. A control in the top right corner makes it possible to switch the alternative search engine to another one.

A left click on a search result in the Google column will open the website as usual. A click on a result in the alternative search engine on the other hand will open the result just in the area of that search engine. Users who want to open the website normally will have to open it in a new tab or window instead.

Google Unified Search is an excellent way of displaying additional information about a search term in the Google search results.

This functionality is available to all users. Registered users on the other hand can add the social bookmarking component to the mix. A Facebook or Worio account is needed for this. Once the account has been created it is possible to start saving bookmarks which will shape the profile over time meaning that Worio will use that data to display recommendations. If a user tags a lot of operating system, backup software or networking topics then that is what will be recommended primarily to him.

The account creation is a breeze for Facebook users as most data will be imported from there. Another interesting feature is the ability to import bookmarks from Delicious which also works incredibly well. Every page can be added to the bookmarks. If a user chooses to do so a new overlay image appears that displays tag recommendations and options to add or remove tags before saving the site.

A bookmarklet is provided that can be used to tag and add active websites to the Worio profile. The site can also be added to the list of available search engines.

The verdict:

The developers have created an easily accessible bookmarking site that adds to the search experience with its recommendation engine. It does well as a bookmarking site alone but excels when the search is used as well.

Once you have it all set up you can either enter your site URL or enter the location of your sitemap XML. If you use WordPress the Google Sitemap Generator plugin will create and maintain this file for you, so you can just add the location of that.

You can then generate a report which will take a while, depending on how many links there are. I found this tool handy, but there are many drawbacks. The main one is that it checks del.icio.us, Hatena and Livedoor. Since the developer is Japanese I am guessing it is aimed at the Japanese needs, but delicios is something most of us use, so it’s still handy to have.

The bigger problem I had is that it took me 10 tries to get it to display a report for my blogHack Your Day, which now has 380 links. The bar just froze at a number between 75% and 82% and refused to move. I would like to add however that the actual application did not freeze up, which is something I rarely see.

For those of you who have great big blogs this is a bummer, I mean gHacks has well over 5,000 posts now, that’s just 5,000+ links for the posts, so generation would probably not work at all. Despite all this, I would welcome any additions and improvements as this would be the tool for a lot of bloggers! Also, if you know any similar tools, especially ones with Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit can you let us know in the comments?

The What’s Hot on the Web currently features three pages with a total of 50 links and links to many empty pages at the bottom which will surely be filled over time. Even more surprising than the empty pages is that the link to page 2 is missing. Visitors can access the homepage which contains the 20 most popular stories “right now” and then head over to page 3 since page 2 is not visible anywhere.

Visiting page three however displays an url that can be manipulated to be able to visit the second page as well. Simply changing the 3 at the end to a 2 will load the second page with the links 21-40.

Alexa’s What’s Hot on the Web provides another nice overview of some of the hottest topics on the Internet currently. It’s basically similar to services like Google Trends, Delicious Popular or even Digg. If you like those kind of sites you will also like this one.

Update: The What’s Hot page has received slight modifications in recent years. Alexa is still displayed the top 20 list of what is hot on the page. These topics lead to ten web articles about the topic. A click on the topic opens it on the linked website.

Hot Products appears to be a more recent addition. It lists ten high in demand products, again with links to websites about those products.

Frankly del.icio.us was one of the founding Web 2.0 services, along with Wikipedia, Amazon and Ebay. It’s the most popular social bookmarking service, even though the social aspects are ignored by many of the users.

For better or for worse it also popularized the web 2.0 URL… full stops are no harder to type then forwards slashes, but it sure feels like it.

Anyway it looks like the new Delicious service will be launching VERY soon. That’s right, del.ico.us has now officially become Delicious, although they’ve had the URL for years now.

Tech Crunch posted some screenshots a while ago which showed the new service to be pretty impressive, a complete code re-write, a cool new theme and interface and a stack of new features.

Apparently scalability was an issue which has held up the release for a year now. Ironically it was also the initial reason for the complete re-write.

Anyway, with the official blog providing assurance that “After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven” it may very well be true this time.

When it launches you’ll be automatically logged out of your account. I hope you guys will be able to handle this…

Personally, while an update will be nice, I never use del.icio.us through the web interface. I use it purely as a way to store my bookmarks online, no friend sharing, no visiting the homepage nothing. Flock 2.0 has awesome integration with del.cio.us and that’s how I use it.

Del.icio.us is a online bookmarking service where users can add websites to. A small description and tags can be added to those websites and an account is required to store them online.

To import all Delicious bookmarks into Firefox do the following. Head over to Delicious and select settings > export/backup to save all bookmarks in an html file. Make sure to include the tags. A click on Export To HTML starts the process.

Now export all bookmarks of Firefox 3 as a JSON file as well. This can be done in Bookmarks > Organize bookmarks and there by clicking on the Import and Export button.

Now that you have both files saved go to the website that combines both bookmarks and merges them so that only one bookmark file is left in the end that can be imported into Firefox again. The new file is in JSON format as well, the format that is the default Firefox format for storing bookmarks. The import of that merged bookmarks file is done in the same menu as the export mentioned above.

We have two different approaches though. The first is to get a so called double ranking. If two pages of a website are on the same results page the lower ranking one gets moved just below the higher ranking one. If you have the number 1 spot the lower ranking one will get the number 2 spot even if it would only qualify for number 9 or 10.

That’s two spots of ten already. What happens if you submit a site to a social news or bookmarking website ? Right, it gets a new entry in the search engines that points to the original url that the marketer wants to promote. Many social sites like Digg have such a high standing at Google that their results are often seen in the top 10 or 20 if you search for a keyword.

There is another way that is currently possible. Google treats subdomains as if they were different domains. Marketers create keyword rich subdomains that are pushed in the search engines as well. So, even if you expect to see 10 different results the reality could be different.

If you happen to use Delicious regularly you might find Netlicious [homepage, via Freeware Genius] very helpful. Users can use it to manage their delicious bookmarks locally which includes editing posts. The application requires the Microsoft .net framework so make sure you have that installed. Once that is out of the way you provide your Delicious username and password during the start of Netlicious.

All of the bookmarks of that Delicious profile are downloaded and displayed in a matter of seconds, very fast and nice. The left pane contains all the tags that have been used to describe bookmarks, the upper right pane contains the posts that are associated with the selected tag and the lower right pane contains a preview of the page.

The preview pane can be disabled if you do not need that one. The edit function is available after right-clicking a tag or a bookmark. If you right-click a tag you can change the name of the tag while a right-click on the bookmark makes it possible to edit the title, url, the tags, notes and private status.

Posts can be deleted as well or opened in the default browser of the system. One nice feature is the option to export the bookmarks either in html or xml format. If you save them in html format you gain a clickable list of all of your stored bookmarks. Could come handy.

If a site has been bookmarked at Delicious it is shown in the Yahoo Search Results pages. The number of users who have bookmarked it as well as the main tags that have been used to bookmark it are shown. A click on the number of users who bookmarked a link using Delicious leads to the bookmark at Delicious while a click on any of the tags mentioned opens the tag listing at Delicious which does not necessarily mean that the website is listed on that website.

I think that this is a nice idea to integrate Delicious into Yahoo. It could give users confidence that the website that they are going to visit has been useful for other users because of the bookmarks at Delicious. I would not like to see a integration of the amount of bookmarks in the search results because it is not a huge problem to get hundreds of bookmarks at Delicious for a small amount of money.

The cheapest offer that I was able to find was to pay $5 for 50 bookmarks at Delicious. Yahoo should take this into consideration.

While the service is nice if you are on the road it does not make much sense if you are working at home using your own computer. It’s not really comfortable to go to Delicious, login and search through your bookmarks or tags to find the one that you are looking for.

A far better way is the Simple Delicious add-on which creates a new entry in the Firefox menu giving the user access to all of his bookmarks after supplying his login details. The bookmarks from Delicious are synced afterwards and sorted by tags which means that it will look crowded if you are one of those users who use lots of tags for every bookmark.

I guess it works best if you use one or two tags for every bookmark that you save at Delicious. You should note however that if you do use more than one tag that the bookmark will appear more than once in the list. So, the best way would be one tag for each bookmark.

I decided to create a new account just for this purpose because I have been using five and more tags per bookmark that I saved at Delicious.

Read More:

Simple Delicous

A sweat little object is popping up in front when you visit Fichey and you can use that to take a look at all the sites that were popular at those websites in the past. Since Fichey is relatively new you can only access sites that were popular beginning with July the 6th of 2007.

Every site that was popular in the past is opened in the same browser tab which means that you browse one site at a time and can flip through them. It looks like Ajax was used to create the effect, looks pretty nice. Pretty good way to flip through many popular sites in a very short period of time.

Update: The Fichey website is no longer accessible. It is not clear if this is a temporary situation or if the project has been abandoned by its developers.

I’m not aware of any comparable service. An alternative that shows trending topics and what’s popular right now is Popurls. The srevice displays popular stories on Digg, Reddit, Chime, YouTube, Flickr and a lot of other popular websites.

Content blocks and other parameters on the site can be customized on the site. Users can furthermore hoover over topics to get a one paragraph description of the linked article. It is also important to note that a click on the title links to the media directly (which can be an image, video, text or other media), while a click on the comment icon loads the actual page the media link was posted on. The two can be the same destination but they do not have to be, especially not on voting style sites.

The major difference is how they add the functionality. Widgets for Opera usually open in their own window (like a mini sized popup) and one can opt to have the widget always on top. This means that they stay on top even if Opera is minimized. I actually prefer to browse the Opera website for Widgets because it looks much cleaner and professional than the one for Firefox. Not a fan of the windows marketplace at all. All widgets are free to download which is another similarity that Opera and Firefox share. Enough of the babbling, here is the list of 10 must-see Opera Widgets.

1. Video Downloader – lets you download videos from many video sites including youtube. It is a little bit different from the Firefox extension with the same name. This Video downloader opens a small popup and requires you to paste a link of the video into it. It displays the download link afterwards.
2. Gmail Checker – displays a very small icon with the amount of mails currently unread in your inbox. Can be moved around any way you like.
3. Image Grep – nice widget that makes it possible to search flickr, google and yahoo for tags and keywords specified. Displays the results neatly in its windows. F5 refreshes the results, a double-click loads the image in Opera.
4. Mini Del.icio.us – this one is fantastic. It ask for a del.icio.us username at first start and offers a quick and easy way to load any bookmark of that user.
5. gCalendar – read only Calendar that pulls data from Google Calendar. Great for the quick overview.
6. Bug Me Not  – Users submit general passwords to the Bug me not database and everyone else may use those passwords to visit the website and read content that is for members only. Just enter a url and the widget searches the bug me not database and displays the results.
7. Pandora Radio – displays the Pandora radio in the widget window. Easy and fast access to your radio stations.
8. Digg Frontpage – displays the frontpage news of digg.com
9. Fark Frontpage – similar widget that displays news of fark.com
10. Bittorent – searches many torrent search engines, displays result in the widget.

I never had the time and passion to submit my articles to many bookmarking sites and only submitted it occasionally to the most popular services. That is, until I found the site onlywire which handles most of the submitting process for me. I had to signup for the service – it is free of course – and provide login details for all the social bookmarking services that I wanted to combine. I then had to drop a bookmarklet into my browser bar and click on it whenever I was on a page that I wanted to submit to all of the services that I supplied login details for.

I’m using Onlywire to submit every article that I write to 15 bookmarking services with a single mouse click. This is pretty efficient and I can already notice some traffic that is coming from several of the services. The only other step is to supply tags for the article in question which will be used to categorize the article at the social bookmarking services.

source: monetizr

All bookmarks in that account at del.icio.us will be analyzed and added to a list of bookmarks. A green background color means that the link is correct and working, a red one that an error happened while trying to connect to the website. This does not necessarily mean that the link is broken. It could mean that the site is currently down for instance.

A view only filter displays only certain bookmarks if activated. It is possible to set the filters that way that only links are displayed that were not working at the time of the check. A manage wrong posts button makes it easy to delete erroneous bookmarks after x tries of connecting to the server.

source: genbeta (Spanish)