27 April 2011

[EDITED] The Delicious Post Extension: Implications of Yahoo!'s Sale of Delicious

Word came today that Delicious, the online social bookmarking website which Yahoo! acquired in 2005, has now been bought out by the founders of YouTube.

This caught my attention, since not only am I a loyal Delicious user, I am also maintaining a Firefox extension, Delicious Post, for adding bookmarks to Delicious. I was also interested to learn what this would mean for Delicious Post, because for quite some time I've been struggling to make it work with OAuth-based Yahoo! logins without much success. OAuth authentication is painful to implement, with so many steps to follow and a lot of room for errors, many of which are difficult to isolate given that they could originate from one's own code or from the code libraries being used (or unknowingly misused). The poorly-written Delicious OAuth documentation hasn't helped at all.

According to what I've read in a Delicious developer forum post, the old-skool Delicious logins will still function, but users with Yahoo! logins will have to migrate to using Delicious logins. So this means that I no longer have to worry about making Delicious Post work with OAuth authentication. Woo hoo!

What will this mean for current Delicious Post users? Since Delicious Post only supports the old-skool logins, current users can continue to use this Firefox add-on without any issues.

EDIT: Don't forget that you need to accept the new privacy policy and terms of service agreements in order to continue using Delicious beyond the transition from Yahoo! to AVOS, the company that is taking over Delicious. You should be prompted to do this when you visit your bookmarks on the Delicious website.