Pinboard Acquires Online Bookmark Service Del.icio.us, Ends Updates On June 15

Pinboard has acquired the old-school online bookmarking service Del.icio.us in a move that’s likely to bring in the more than 1 billion bookmarks into Pinboard catalog of  ideas. While Del.icio.us will remain online, on June 15, it will be put into “read-only” mode, meaning that no new bookmarks will be saved and the API will be shut down.

Existing users will be able to transfer their bookmarks to their Pinboard account, which costs $11 per year. In the future, there will be an option to export bookmarks to a third-party service. Currently it’s not possible because the feature was disabled due to “performance reasons.”

This is the latest twist in the bookmarking service’s extensive history. Founded in 2003 in the hey-day of Technorati, Digg, and when there was an obsession to save things in the cloud, Del.icio.us was purchased by Yahoo two years after its founding before being a casualty of the search engine’s mass sunsetting effort in 2011. Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter once expressed his disappointment in the acquisition, saying he wised he hadn’t sold to Yahoo. It earned a reprieve before then when it was sold to the YouTube founders who had started a new internet studio called AVOS.

But that wasn’t the end of the line for Del.icio.us as it was once again sold in 2014 to Los Angeles tech incubator Science, which was started by former MySpace chief executive Michael Jones. It seems that no one really knew what to do with the company. Last year, the site once again changed hands to a new company formed by Science and Domainersuite and just last month it was sold to the founder of Pinboard.

Got all of that? Great…. *phew*

Pinboard has a similar premise to Del.icio.us, allowing you to bookmark sites and other things with an emphasis on speed over socializing.

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