Speaking of fannish diasporas: Del.ic.ious

[starlady]

As far as I'm concerned Yahoo is the black hole of the Internet at this point: whatever goes in, never comes out again. The latest entry on the list of things that Yahoo has ruined is Del.ic.ious--remember when Yahoo fired all of its staff a few months ago as preparation for 'sunsetting' the service? Well, two days ago a deal was announced in which AVOS, which is owned by the founders of YouTube, will buy Delicious from Yahoo. And, like the plebes we are, Delicious users are supposed to rejoice, and more importantly, to agree to transfer our content along with the service this summer.

Not so fast.

AVOS' new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are vastly different from Delicious' current, soon to be former, policies: undefined 'offensive' content is now no longer freely bookmarkable. For fandom, the important quotation is this one:

You agree not to do any of the following: post, upload, publish, submit or transmit any Content that: (…) violates, or encourages any conduct that would violate, any applicable law or regulation or would give rise to civil liability; (iii) is fraudulent, false, misleading or deceptive; (iv) is defamatory, obscene, pornographic, vulgar or offensive (…)

Yup. I'm sure all of us can think of enough copyright takedowns on YouTube (Downfall parodies, anyone?) that we should naturally be chary of the YouTube gusy, and as far as I'm concerned, this seals the deal: Delicious was great while it lasted, but I'm out. Thanks for nothing, Yahoo!, why can't you just go bankrupt and put us out of our misery already.

In the meantime, I've imported my bookmarks to pinboard.in, i.e. pinboard. Accounts are not free, to discourage spammers, and are prorated based on the size of the userbase; currently accounts are $9.32 each. It's a lot like Delicious, and pretty user-friendly so far. I'm starlady there, I hope you'll come join me!

Comments

[wintercreek]

I was all set to sign up for pinboard, and then when I tried it told me that "wintercreek" was already taken! By a disabled account, no less! So now I have to think up a different username, I suppose. *dramatic hand-to-forehead* Oh, how difficult life is.

[zeborah]

I don't believe "offensive" sites can't be bookmarked. It says you can't "post, upload" etc "offensive" stuff - bookmarking doesn't post or upload the content of the site. A url in itself isn't offensive. Ergo, no problem.

It does mean you can't label a site with "offensive" tags. I can see downsides to this and you may feel this restricts you too much too; but on the upside it stops attempts at googlebombing which might otherwise cause a google search for {offensive word} to come up with a targeted website just because google's indexing new!delicious's tagging structure. For example.

[starlady]

I was unaware of plans to google index new!Delicious tags, and that's a very good point.

But at this point I'm very, very wary of these sorts of policies in which the onus is on the user and the service has all the discretion it wants to define what's "offensive." And I'm sure that "publish" and "submit" are in there to be construed as bookmarking. Particularly compared with Delicious' former terms of service, which took no responsibility for what users bookmarked or other users' exposure to it, and attempted no control over user bookmarking, this is a very unwelcome change.

[zeborah]

I don't know of any explicit plans of Google's, just can't see why they wouldn't.

I don't think "publish/submit" etc can possibly be legally construed as bookmarking. Because what they talk about allowing us to publish is "Member Content", and then they say that by publishing "Member Content" we grant them certain non-exclusive rights over it. And legally we can't grant them any rights at all over the content of the sites we bookmark; therefore the term "Member Content" can't be meant to refer to the content of the sites, but only to the stuff that we personally type in and submit into the delicious database - the link itself and any tags or notes etc.

The discretionary aspect of it does have potential problems, though, you're right (though I don't see much way around this: post a set of rules and people will find a way around them that's still highly offensive). I wouldn't say that anyone should sign up if they're unhappy with it, just I wanted to clarify that the T&C aren't referring to the content of any site that's bookmarked, only the content that will actually be stored in their database.