paraka

Anyone who follows me on Twitter was there with me last Tuesday (and probably joined in) on my huge moaning/wailing/flailing over the "new Delicious".

I knew that the Delicious take over was happening and I was pretty wary about any changes, but I never imagined that the changes would be so drastic so fast. God.

This is such a huge loss to fandom. Delicious as it is right now is completely unusable for most fans. See this post by kronos999 for the details. I know that Delicious plans to bring back a lot of the missing features but who knows how long that'll take, or how good the new old features will be?

As seperis said, "This isn't the equivalent of either time we got new management at LJ--and Livejournal, you realize you are officially going to be many people's new perfect standard of changeover, right? No, seriously, you are. People are going to be saying how awesome and wonderful and sensitive you were!"

To make matters worse, there isn't really a Delicious clone for people to flock to (like we did to GJ/IJ/DW). There's Pinboard, which seems like the site with the best features and has a fandom friendly owner, however fandom is never going to fully embrace a site without free accounts. Too many people won't be able to afford it or can't pay for things online. A lot just won't pay/put the money out there. Others, who are lurkers won't adapt to it (because they won't pay for something that they're not adding content to).

Diigo is free and is similar to Delicious, however they censor links posted to their site.

AO3 has it's bookmarking, but even they have said that they're not a viable alternative at the moment. There's also the fact that AO3 is a little too fannish. I want something a little more flexible from a social bookmarking site. There are a lot of things that I use fannishly that aren't specifically fanish. Like useful sites for researching fic ideas or meta that applies to fandom but isn't written by fandom. Or hell, just the random bookmarks I want to add that aren't related to fandom at all.

There are other Delicious-like options, but they just feel so off to me, and seem much more focused on web 2.0 where pictures or video supersede things link tag visibility.

There've been a couple places where people have talked about building a fandom Delicious, most of which have centralized to working with the Slash Report team. I'm really seriously considering joining their efforts (I'm not really a coder but I'm a good organizer!) but I need to examine my time commitments before I fully commit.

Back in December, when news of Delicious being "sunset"ed surfaced, my roommate kronos999 started seriously talking about building a fannish Delicious (which she dubbed "fic.ticio.us" in her head). She started researching and learning about new kinds of code (she does have programming experience, just not much with web programming - She's since joined the team headed by Slash Report).

We (kronos999, our other roommate diurnal_lee and I) also spent a lot of time in the months after that first announcement talking about what we'd want a fannish Delicious to have. Everything from basic functionality all the way to pie-in-the-sky-what-we'd-add-if-we-won-the-lottery-and-could-hire-a-team-of-coders-full-time.

We've had many conversations about it but, with what happened to Delicious, we thought it'd be a good idea to actually get them organized and written down. Our living room is currently filled with multicoloured sticky notes and whiteboards covered in ideas (in a spectrum of do-ability). :P

So, without further ado, here's our ideas. Please feel free to throw in your own ideas, or talk about any of our ideas that don't work for you in the comments.

( Basic, Must-Have Features )

The above features would ideally be there for rollout. Delicious already had most of those features and I'm sure there will be other basic features that Delicious had that I'm forgetting that would be included too (although feel free to remind me what they are). The next sections are add ons. Some could be implemented rather easily, others are OMG amazing features that for practical purposes are almost impossible (at the moment!).

( Advanced Features )

So yeah, those were the features we thought up. What do you think?