During the past week, a slide from a Yahoo all-hands meeting was leaked; the slide showed that Yahoo was calling "sunset" on Delicious.
Yahoo retorted the following day that it wasn't killing off Delicious; rather, it planned to sell the service. Internally, we wondered who would want to buy the easily replicable, none-too-profitable site.
Now, Stephen Hood, who has held senior and director-level project management positions at Yahoo and Delicious since 2005, has added his voice to the mix "as someone who was on the inside for a while and who wants very much to see Delicious live on."
In a blog post today, Hood states the obvious -- that Yahoo has already laid off much of the Delicious team and doesn't plan to maintain the service itself -- and the not-so-obvious, including some tidbits about Delicious's technology that indicate it might not be a good buy for another company.
"During my time at Delicious," Hood writes, "we rebuilt the entire infrastructure to deeply leverage a number of internal Yahoo technologies. It’s all great stuff but not exactly easy to remove or replace. Yahoo may have to license some of this technology to the buyer."
For the same reason, Hood states that open-sourcing the service doesn't make a lot of sense.
Ultimately, Hood believes Delicious's best bet is to survive as an archive of "the collective online journeys of millions of users during a time when the web was evolving dramatically," perhaps through an entity such as the Library of Congress. In that case, Delicious would cease to operate as a service with users and features; only the data would remain as a sort of digital scrapbook.
In a best-case scenario, Yahoo itself would facilitate and manage the exporting of public Delicious data. And of course, users and developers are already working on exporting tools in a grassroots way.