David Janes' Code Weblog

Yahoo sold Delicious to another company and for the most part it hasn’t worked for me since the transition. I don’t use the “social” part of the bookmarking: I just try to bookmark every interesting page I read in case I need to find it again in the future. If Yahoo had been clever, they could have built cleverer search infrastructure around bookmarking information but of course “Yahoo” and “clever” rarely appear in the same sentence with being chaperoned by “not”.

I know startups are hard and I feel a little bit bad about kicking them when they’re down but features likely multi-word tagging are not so nearly interesting to me as “working” so it’s off to Evernote which has a lot more powerful clipping capabilities, is well funded, charges money – free doesn’t stay in business.

Here’s how I did the migration:

• If you have 8747 bookmarks like me, you’ll need to do this and do two export / imports. Delicious’ new API only exports 1000 entries (f*ck you very much), so you’ll have to hack your DNS a little to pull the API data from the old Yahoo servers that are still up and running. I hand edited the exports to avoid duplicates though maybe Evernote is clever enough to figure this out on it’s own.
• Follow the instructions on this page. Basically:
• curl https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > backup.xml
• paste into here http://jsdo.it/palaniraja/uphW/fullscreen (on a Mac anyway)
• save the results as toimport.enex
• run Evernote and run File > Import

I’m totally loving this Gigaom article by Stacey Higgenbotham:

Since the magical breakout of Twitter in 2007 and the Foursquare success of 2009, SXSW has become more and more cluttered with startups trying to break out. It has also become a celebration of startups in general. However, that celebration has turned into a fetish — placing the act of creating a startup on a pedestal without casting any sort of critical eye on the quality or likelihood of that startup or idea succeeding.

[...] But amid the hundreds of startups launching, pitching, forming or otherwise trying to break out at SXSW, how many of them are real businesses? How many of them are thought out beyond a scrawl on a napkin, or a quick debate ahead of a startup weekend?

[...] The thousands of startups today that are pitching themselves at app competitions or in industry conferences all seem to think being a startup is enough. That daring to come up with some idea, any idea, and build a beta site is enough. That the users will come and then the business model will come and then the money will come. Google, Facebook and Twitter are their icons. Somehow the act of creating a startup has become the goal instead of the building of a business.

[...] My issue is less with those littering the web with launch pages — if people want to take some time to test out a web site idea in their spare time, that’s far better than watching Two and Half Men reruns — but with the media, the venture firms and the ecosystem that has been built up to worship this idea of a startup. Maybe a little less fawning in the coverage and a little more skepticism is needed.

I quoted a little more than I wanted to here but there’s so many good lines – read the whole thing. An “the emperor has no clothes moment”? Remember, the characters in Neil Stephenson novels — if that’s the life you’re trying to recreate — actually had business plans and actually tried to execute them.