Buddasworld

delicious closing down - data migration

The age-old “social” bookmarking service delicious.com which was acquired by Yahoo a few years back has been listed as one of the Yahoo! services to be closed down soon.

Because it’s such an old service a LOT of people have a LOT of bookmarks saved over the years. There’s going to be some panic data migration happening as the news spreads.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to find a nice way to migrate delicious.com bookmarks out and in to Google Bookmarks service.

I’ve learnt that:

1. All the (old) blog posts point to a single web service to migrate bookmarks - persistent.info/delicious2google/ - which has not been working since mid 2010.
2. Google Bookmarks and Google Chrome Bookmarks are two different services which are still not integrated.
3. Google Bookmarks only has an import facility via the Google Toolbar which is not available for Chrome.
4. FireFox delicious extensions don’t sync bookmarks in to FireFox’s Bookmark Manager to assist with the exporting out via Google Toolbar.
5. You can export all your delicious bookmark data / notes / tags to a flat html file using their export service.
6. you can dump all your delicious data to an XML file for later if you have a Terminal shell handy: curl —user USERNAME:PASSWORD -o MyLinks.xml -O https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all

The delicious export service does a nice job of capturing all the data in to a usable HTML document as a stop gap.

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I’m sure somebody can then produce a parser to get this data back in to a bookmarking service such as Googles (if there was a documented API!)

Others are attempting to save the delicious service by campaigning on Twitter. Follow @savedelicious and sign the petition via http://act.ly/2ul