The Demise of Delicious and The Growth of Other Knowledge Collaboration Sites

Well, everyone has been talking about Yahoo’s decision to pull the plug on Delicious and about where they will share bookmarks next. It seems like a lot of different sites have been going under, and I’ve been moving my data from one site to the next.

I recently saved my delicious bookmarks and loaded them into a few different sites. One was Diigo. I’ve played with it a little, including loading a Chrome extension, but it hasn’t really grabbed my attention. I also loaded them into another site, but I forget which one.

Meanwhile, I’ve started playing with Pearltrees. It is a fun graphical way of bookmarking sites and linking the bookmarks together. It has been more interesting to me than some of the other sites, but I haven’t loaded a lot into it yet. It has some nice collaborative functions, and I’ll probably keep playing with it for a while.

I’ve also been using Rockmelt which has a nice share box on the top, as well as some nice side panels for social media. I’ve found I’m actually using it a bit to keep up on different sites. In a similar way, I’ve been playing with OneTrueFan which also has some nice sharing functionality. Now if only I could get OneTrueFan to share to Pearltrees and Diigo.

Besides organizing links, there is another set of sites that has caught my attention recently. Quora is a well done site for people to ask questions and share answers. Many of the early questions I’ve been reading are around technology startups. However, it seems to be broadening out a bit. Some of that may also be, because I’ve been adding a lot of friends and topics.

Then, there is Fluther. Fluther feels a bit like a me too Q&A site and just isn’t doing it for me. They were acquired by Twitter, which might give them a little staying power, but they remind me a lot of Plurk, another cute Me Too site, that I played with for a while and mostly forgot.

Slightly more interesting is Healthysparx. It is a health oriented Q&A system. However, I always worry about systems like this. How many people are getting inaccurate health information and perhaps making poor health choices as a result based on a system like this?

So, knowledge gathering and sharing systems continue to evolve. While others are focusing on mobile or location aware websites, and mourning Yahoo’s plans for Delicious, it may be that this is a good time to be looking more closely and knowledge collaboration.