unp.alata.ble?

My friend Geoff will once again be delighted. He was of course, right again. This time, about del.icio.us. I boasted to him that I love it and couldn’t do without it. Like a young boy telling his dad that this time, his girlfriend would be a good ‘un, I knew that everything I said was coming out wrong.

He warned me that a time would come when I most certainly would have to do without it. And when that time came, I would rue the lack of back-up and be grateful for bookmarks again.

I even told him that there was an app called cocoalicious that let me keep a local copy of my bookmarks. I’d neglected to tell him that I hadn’t used it in some months and so my recent cache of around 200 new bookmarks wouldn’t be in my local store.

Well, as you can see from the screen-grab, del.icio.us, which holds all my bookmarks, but as importantly, my facility to bookmark using tags, is down. It has been down all day. Poo.

And of course, Yahoo go and buy them, like they did Flickr. You know what happens next. Any soul, any slickness, any easy-to-useness, any interface strengths, any simplicity, will be stripped out, crapped on and moulded into a big, crass, vulgar corporate blob. In short, it will become crap. And like anything cool in this world except possibly google, we will lose this coolness forever. You see, once a bigcorp buys something decent like Flickr or del.icio.us, competition is dead. Progress buried. Functionality crippled.

And once again, a little bit of what makes technology so wonderful, so exciting, goes the way of the Commodore Amiga.