Following yesterday’s massive layoffs at Yahoo! by a completely delusional CEO (in the penultimate parapgraph, the claim that their margins are expanding is, while true, utterly ridiculous when compared to other companies – Yahoo!’s stock is up 32% since Bartz took over, Google has been up 100% in the same timeframe), today has seen their unsurprising announcement that they are shutting down del.icio.us, the once beloved site to collect and share your bookmarks – a site which had become pretty obsolete in recent years with the advent of the social web. The buzz on the internet is so insignificant, you’d be forgiven for thinking del.icio.us had disappeared years ago. In the age of Digg, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, who would possibly want to use a Yahoo! site? And that, ironically, is Yahoo!’s problem: not that they are having to shut down del.icio.us, but that, really, nobody actually gives a damn. Apart from Flickr, which could be considered relevant, although it hosts far less photographs than Facebook does, and maybe its email service, Yahoo! is the Lycos of 2010.

To be honest, I have never used del.icio.us, because even in its early days I didn’t see the point. I have saved all my bookmarks on my laptop, they’re on a beyondRAID external HDD, and they’re backed up incrementally and automatically into an encrypted cloud storage, just like all the other important data I have (which is mainly photographs, music, documents, emails). I have never used IMAP but always POP3, not when I was still using Yahoo!, not for the short time that I was using GMail, and not since I have had my own servers (yes, I have two, one in Germany, one in the US). I am, you might have guessed, “a bit” of a nerd. One like those that the wonderfully amazing Merlin Mann so accurately described when I saw him at dConstruct this year, in his talk Kerning, Orgasms & Those Goddamned Japanese Toothpicks. The same conference where, by the way, I also heard Hannah Donovan’s talk on improvisation which I talked about in class last Friday. (The video I showed of her playing with one of the conference’s organisers, Jeremy Keith, is on my Vimeo profile, in case anyone wants to watch it in its entirety.)

I am an early adopter. I had Flattr and Google Wave when everyone was still trying to grab an account. I joined Facebook in September 2006, right after it opened up to non-US students. The problem with online services – and that also applies to Facebook, to Twitter or even invite-only services like the great Dribbble – is that they can disappear from one second to the next. They don’t even have to give you an advance warning. They flip a switch, and all of your data is gone. When, at the beginning of term, our lecturer explained that del.icio.us is great for keeping your bookmarks organised at an online service, I found myself disagreeing completely. I was told I had to sign up for a service that belonged to a struggling company that had been closing down service after service for months. Remember 360°, Tech or Geocities?

At the time of writing (9.28pm, GMT), Facebook is down, and it has been for over ten minutes already. The largest social website in the world, with over 500 million users, is unreachable. The service that hosts billions of photographs, videos and messages has vanished off the face of the internet. Case in point.

See, keeping your data somewhere online isn’t keeping it safe. It’s tempting fate. None of them have any obligation to keep going or to give you your data back before they switch all the servers off. Because you agree to terms of service which tell you that the service could disappear at any moment and that all the responsibility to keep copies lies with you. You don’t pay for any of these services, and as such you have no right to expect anything from them. At all. And those companies don’t care about your opinion. Because services like Facebook have such a critical mass that even if ten million people left, it wouldn’t have an impact at all. But because everyone of your friends is using it, would you really leave it and not have access to their photos, status updates and shared links anymore? It’s largely a walled garden – once you delete your account, there is no way you can see what is going on inside.

No, you shouldn’t use del.icio.us. Or if you do, make sure you have those bookmarks saved locally as well. Never forget: a backup which is not both redundant and off-site is not a backup at all!

How will we get marked, since one of the assessments is based on our usage of del.icio.us? No word from our lecturer as of yet. And to be honest, I am glad del.icio.us is pretty much gone. It will let us move on to more efficient link-sharing. And hopefully it will show enough people that, no, using an online service is not a good idea if you want reliability.

By the way, Facebook is still down (9.38pm). It has been for over twenty minutes now. Ask yourself this: how much of your data would be completely lost forever if Facebook suddenly disappeared?

Unfortunately, there are a few people missing. They will follow once I have photos of them, too.