Posted in War on Privacy

Google to del.icio.us users: Trust us with your link collections

The Monster of Mountain View sees an opportunity to gobble up more user data:

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 traffic 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 after three months.

There’s no reason to use Google Bookmarks when there are far better del.icio.us alternatives out there… like Histori.us, which can easily import del.icio.us link collections. Or Zootool.