> I’d love to learn what it actually cost to run Delicious. I just can’t imagine that it was a huge expense.
An analogy.
I travel a lot, sometimes "living on the road" for quite a while at a time. It's a marvelous life.
I carefully consider what I pack. Every little thing takes space and weight, which means less space/weight for something else.
A friend of mine was with me when I was doing some packing, and I was looking at my Kindle charger and iPhone charger. Both of the USB plugs can plug into an adapter so it can plug into a power outlet.
Turns out, Kindle and iPhone USB-to-outlet adapter are the same, and it works for both devices. I tested it, and then was weighing them and trying to size up their durability to choose which one to keep.
My friend said, "Why not keep both? They're small, and maybe there'll be problems later if you don't have both..."
And you know what? He's right. I could totally make the judgmental call to keep both of them, and it'd make no real difference on my space/weight. The problem is, there's 10-15 other little things I have to make the same judgment call on, and it adds up fast.
Sometimes you have to cut, even if this particular cut doesn't mean anything significant, because making 10-15 cuts really does add up to something significant.
This doesn't make Yahoo's decision here a good call or a bad call. But it's something to think about when anyone says "This one isn't too [expensive/heavy/big/cumbersome/time-intensive]" - no, maybe not, but little costs can add up fast.
Even in the worst case you'd just buy another charger somewhere in the world, or plug into it a computer in a internet cafe or borrow someone else's.
I travelled to Honduras (from the U.K.) and realised after a few days I didn't have a charger for camera and then battery ran down. It's non standard and I couldn't find one anywhere. However, I noticed someone I met had a similar camera so I just borrowed her charger. In another situation (another trip) a friend's camera failed, but I had two cameras by then, I let her borrow one of mine with her memory card for the rest of the trip - problem solved.
Somehow, I don't think your story (or mine) has anything to do with dropping a business with millions of users, annoying lots of customers, with knock on effects for Flickr, upcomming etc. and losing trust with the early adopter community which are key to many new products succeeding.
However once we accept that delicious is going to close, the question remains, what happens to the data?
The publically available (non-private) bookmarks, tags and notes should continue to live. Perhaps a dataset could be made available in some way, eg via torrent?
Not intending to undermine your metaphor, more as an aside aimed at anyone who has just gone "ooo, I can pack one less adaptor", it's worth noting that in the UK the two USB / outlet adaptors are not the same and do not work together (based on iPhone 3GS and most recent model Kindle).
An analogy.
I travel a lot, sometimes "living on the road" for quite a while at a time. It's a marvelous life.
I carefully consider what I pack. Every little thing takes space and weight, which means less space/weight for something else.
A friend of mine was with me when I was doing some packing, and I was looking at my Kindle charger and iPhone charger. Both of the USB plugs can plug into an adapter so it can plug into a power outlet.
Turns out, Kindle and iPhone USB-to-outlet adapter are the same, and it works for both devices. I tested it, and then was weighing them and trying to size up their durability to choose which one to keep.
My friend said, "Why not keep both? They're small, and maybe there'll be problems later if you don't have both..."
And you know what? He's right. I could totally make the judgmental call to keep both of them, and it'd make no real difference on my space/weight. The problem is, there's 10-15 other little things I have to make the same judgment call on, and it adds up fast.
Sometimes you have to cut, even if this particular cut doesn't mean anything significant, because making 10-15 cuts really does add up to something significant.
This doesn't make Yahoo's decision here a good call or a bad call. But it's something to think about when anyone says "This one isn't too [expensive/heavy/big/cumbersome/time-intensive]" - no, maybe not, but little costs can add up fast.