> I’d love to learn what it actually cost to run Delicious. I just can’t imagine that it was a huge expense.<p>An analogy.<p>I travel a lot, sometimes "living on the road" for quite a while at a time. It's a marvelous life.<p>I <i>carefully</i> consider what I pack. Every little thing takes space and weight, which means less space/weight for something else.<p>A friend of mine was with me when I was doing some packing, and I was looking at my Kindle charger and iPhone charger. Both of the USB plugs can plug into an adapter so it can plug into a power outlet.<p>Turns out, Kindle and iPhone USB-to-outlet adapter are the same, and it works for both devices. I tested it, and then was weighing them and trying to size up their durability to choose which one to keep.<p>My friend said, "Why not keep both? They're small, and maybe there'll be problems later if you don't have both..."<p>And you know what? He's right. I could totally make the judgmental call to keep both of them, and it'd make no real difference on my space/weight. The problem is, there's 10-15 other little things I have to make the same judgment call on, and it adds up fast.<p>Sometimes you have to cut, even if this particular cut doesn't mean anything significant, because making 10-15 cuts really does add up to something significant.<p>This doesn't make Yahoo's decision here a good call or a bad call. But it's something to think about when anyone says "This one isn't too [expensive/heavy/big/cumbersome/time-intensive]" - no, maybe not, but little costs can add up fast.
This title is designed to get people to click it (to discover what "The One Group" is), rather than to be informative. Please add e.g. ": Developers" to the end of it, so that people can click on it only if they actually want to read the article.
Actually, Yahoo has been a pretty developer-friendly company - for a while the geocoding service had less restrictive TOS than Google's; Pipes is pretty nifty; YUI, while a bit too verbose for my taste, is very well-designed; and of course, Douglas Crockford, the father of JSON, works at Yahoo.<p>This doesn't obviate OP's point - that closing a bunch of services makes developers less inclined to build on your platform. But I'm not sold on the idea that this will irrevocably alienate developers.<p>Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still jump on cue if the platform is good enough.
<i>Yahoo just pissed off the one group they shouldn’t have. That group? Developers.</i><p>As despairing as I am of Delicious's demise, I can't go along with this. Yahoo hasn't been a developer focused company in the last couple of years, even technologies like Pipes have progressed little.<p>Yahoo is a media company. They sell advertising. They cater to the masses. They're an AOL. If I were in charge, ditching everything not related to being a mass media company would probably get the chop too. Yahoo is no oasis for developers in my eyes.
> And now I wonder if any developer will want to work with Yahoo when they know that services in their area might be closed at any time.<p>The OP was talking about why Google is more developer friendly but seems to have totally forgotten Wave, Jaiku, etc. This article is just poor generalizations.
A friend of mine has created <a href="http://historio.us" rel="nofollow">http://historio.us</a> I ve started using it 2 months back and never looked back. The founder is also a member of HN. Search for stavroskor
tl;dr Article believes Yahoo should pander to unprofitable developers.<p>Yahoo think they should concentrate on the non developer types that click on adverts.
And they have perhaps pissed off another extremely important group -- the smart engineers that they want to come work for them. They probably haven't done it as badly as Oracle has recently, but if they keep this up it's gonna hurt.
Luckily Xmarks backs up my delicious bookmarks. Oh, wait, Xmarks is going away. Oh, wait, Lastpass bought xmarks. Whew. Now all I loose is the tags. And the community. Oh, wait, that's what I really wanted anyway. Hmmmm.... Del.icio.us as fee-for-service anyone? Couldn't yahoo spin this off to an investor who wants to take it in that direction?
I think they should at least consider selling it or focusing on promoting its API to allow developers to develop better/cool stuff.<p>Btw, a post regarding its competitor
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2014670" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2014670</a>
Seriously. Yahoo is a platform for people who semi-professional homem makers in the 90's. Delicious is one of their properties that is not like all the rest. Their bridge to the literate web!