Agreed, for the most part. Yahoo had the right idea acquiring quality services like del.icio.us, flickr, and upcoming, but clearly lacked any vision as for what to do with them.
Something suggests that Yahoo not only lacks vision of what to do about delicious, it lacks vision and style of web services in general. For some reason none of the home-grown Yahoo services (ie not those acquired in recent years) have ever attracted me as a user. For anything Yahoo tried to do, however good-looking, there have always been more decent alternatives out there on the Net (probably Google more often than anything else).
Come on, Jeremy... I think all (or nearly all) of the Yahoo Pipes developers quit. From what I hear, management refused to support their project beyond the demo/PR stage. Some of them work for Google now.
I still think that what Yahoo did with del.icio.us (or rather didn't do) borders on criminal. At the time, del.icio.us had the opportunity to be taken to a different scale as an information discovery tool. It remains my most used web service (thanks to the Firefox integration), but it's sad that there was such limited follow on innovation.
It's one of my most used web services too, for personal bookmarking. There is no more disappointing feeling in the world then looking back for an article I read a few weeks ago and realizing I forgot to save it in del.icio.us.
When I think of the huge graph of information they must have about so many pages, I just believe the haven't managed to do anything better on the macro level. How much of the (useful) web must by now be tagged in del.icio.us? Why has not the service become the de facto place to find information based on tag or topic?
The only silver lining I see is that a) the data exists, so such an application could evolve in the future, and b) at least Yahoo didn't muck it up and somehow ruin what continues to be a useful service on the personal level.
