Steve Ely

Delicious customer support and Yahoo turmoil

I’ve been a huge user and proponent of Del.icio.us for about two years now.  I’ve got over 5,000 bookmarks there with a proportionately vast number of tags.  I’ve given a lot of thought to its benefits and enthusiastically sung its praises to multiple audiences of friends and colleagues in library school, in various jobs, and in personal life.  I have, in the past, been very happy with their customer support.   This summer, though, I’ve been rather disappointed by that support, and I wonder if the problems are tied to the apparent turmoil at Yahoo.

Last summer, three different rather vexing problems arose in connection with the basic retrieving functions of Del.icio.us, and my report of one of these was quickly escalated to a product manager who was able, with some effort, to resolve all three problems within a week. This year, after discovering in May that the RSS feed seems to be broken for not only my own account but also for many others, I at first received no reply at all, then only vague assurances and promises in response to my subsequent entreaties, and eventually nothing at all again.

Del.icio.us is owned, of course, by Yahoo.  Like Flickr, it was founded independently and later bought by Yahoo.  Now Yahoo itself seems to be in chaos, with a wildly uncertain future and an inability to keep its management team intact.  After repeated efforts, Microsoft may yet succeed in acquiring some or all of Yahoo.    An advertising deal between Yahoo and Google has aroused controversy and is drawing antitrust attention from the Justice Department.  There’s talk about the company merging with AOL.   Corporate raider Carl Icahan is trying to take it over.

Now Yahoo is overhauling its organizational structure and management team in the wake of the departure of key executives.  I first noticed this with Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield, who was bound to get extra attention because his letter of resignation was a thing of beauty and hilarity.   Few would dare (and still fewer so successfully execute) the lively and lovable tactic of writing the resignation as a fictional (and weird) short story.   Butterfield cast Yahoo as a tin-smithing endeavor that he joined in 1921 and watched expand into such other industries as corrugated steel, synthesized rubber, grain processing, brewing, salty snacks, oil exploration and refining, and hotels & casinos, to name just a few, before finally concluding, 30 years after a sheet of tin last rolled off their production lines, that there’s just no place for him there anymore.  I wondered a bit, perhaps, about the significance of his resignation, but mostly I just appreciated the genius and humor of the letter.

A few days later, though, it really became apparent things were crumbling.   Butterfield had submitted his letter to (then) senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse.  But within a week, it was revealed that Garlinghouse himself was leaving, along with at least three other senior vice presidents.  Clearly, this thing is spiralling out of control.  114 executives have now left since January 2007.  Especially relevant to the impact on the management of Del.icio.us itself is that along with Garlinghouse and the others, Joshua Schachter also found it necessary to resign.

Schachter founded Del.icio.us.  He conceived, developed, and built the thing.  Two and a half years ago, after selling it to Yahoo, he was happy to hand over management and get back to coding.   By this summer, though, he’d apparently become so frustrated with the management of it that he had to get out and join the ranks of the “gloriously unemployed.”  (It’s probably a lot more glorious when you’re a multimillionaire.)

I suspect all this is having its impact on my own difficulties getting effective support as a user.  The TechCrunch blog post tied Schachter’s frustrations to “the development of the new version of delicious [which] seems to have almost stalled within Yahoo,” but it’s difficult to imagine all of this not also affecting the normal resolution of issues with the existing version.

It’s difficult to envision a likely scenario for the company that would really bode well.  Icahan?  Microsoft?  AOL?  Please.  None of that seems at all promising.  As distasteful as all those other options are, though, it’s hard to have faith in the present Yahoo management of Del.icio.us when they can’t even get their RSS feeds to work.   I have to worry about what the state of the product and the support may be in a year or two.

The system Schachter gave us has been perhaps my favorite Web 2.0 tool.  I’ve admired it greatly and used it extensively.   I’ll probably continue to for the time being.   Contingency plans appear increasingly necessary, though.  Recent business news offers a sobering lesson on the dangers of relying so much on anyone’s product, especially one owned by a volatile public company.

Update: Here’s something particularly good to see.  In the morning (her time) of the next business day after I posted this, a comment appeared here from Britta, the Delicious community manager intern, who’s apparently keeping quite close eye on blog posts about Delicious.  As you’ll see below, she clarifies “We’re still live and kicking here at Delicious, and we haven’t changed our support procedures recently. They work most of the time but aren’t perfect, and sometimes unlucky issues slide through the cracks,” and she goes on to address the substance of the policy in the following post.  So that’s well done by her, catching things that drop through those cracks, and hopefully this is the beginning of a fruitful dialog.  It does speak well of their customer service’s vitality when they’re watching this intently what such random people as I happen to say about them.