Delicious
del.icio.us
Delicious taught the web to tag and share bookmarks, survived five owners, and finally became a read-only archive whose social machinery no longer accepted a single link.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Officially Gone
- Peak stage
- general availability
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
A formally launched social-bookmarking service created by Joshua Schachter.
Users saved public links with free-form tags, producing a collective map of the web before feeds and algorithmic timelines dominated discovery.
Existence timeline
The service opens a public system for saving and tagging links.
The bookmarking community joins a major web portal.
Yahoo sells the service to the founders of YouTube.
Delicious passes through further companies while activity declines.
The final owner announces a transition to read-only status.
Users can no longer save bookmarks or use the API.
Why it ended
Pinboard acquired Delicious in June 2017 and disabled new bookmarks and the API on 15 June, ending the service as an active network.
Last confirmed trace
A read-only site persisted for a period, while exports, archived pages and more than a billion stored bookmark records documented its scale.
What it left behind
Its folksonomy and concise URL design shaped tagging across web applications even after the original community stopped moving.
How we classified it
The archive unit reached normal public release or operation and is no longer obtainable in its original public form.
Verified normal public availability maps to 100 under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.