Google Courts Yahoo Users With New Delicious Bookmarks Importer Tool
The Delicious saga continues. In reaction to what many have thought to be Yahoo’s mismanagement of the popular bookmarking service Delicious in the past couple of months, many people have tried to roll their own Delicious importers in hopes of taking advantage of the exodus. Google too has today rolled out a Delicious migration tool for Google Bookmarks, to give people who were scared of the demise of Delicious a safe haven for their meticulously curated links.
On background: Yahoo gave many people a scare a couple of months ago when an internal Yahoo slide was leaked, revealing that Yahoo would be sunsetting Delicious, a social bookmarking site with a vehement cult following. It turns out that by “sunsetting” Yahoo actually meant selling (heh, that’s not actually what sunsetting means). But while Yahoo has approached numerous people about unloading the property, it still has not found a buyer.
Google would have been an excellent choice.
The Google Bookmarks importer allows you to login with either your Yahoo ID or your Delicious ID and import all your bookmarks including labels and tags. And whatever you’ve bookmarked on Delicious integrates seamlessly with your already existing Google Bookmarks links.
Google launched Google Bookmarks in 2005 as a competitor to Delicious and we pretty much forgot about it right until it launched a Lists feature in May. Lists let you copy your bookmarks into lists in order to share publicly and with friends and is completely under-utilized in my opinion. Under the right auspices, I could see it becoming a fulcrum for the social search element of Google News.
Right now to bookmark a site on Google Bookmarks you need to click a star next to what you want bookmarked in your result history or add favorite sites manually, which isn’t the most intuitive process. But Google Bookmarks is in the Google Toolbar and apparently sees a lot of use, so let’s hope this is the first in a series of revamps.
Interesting side note: Delicious founder Joshua Schachter used to work at Google before founding Tasty Labs.
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