Did Delicious Lose Its Chance To Be FriendFeed?

If you are an early adopter in the Internet space or a social media junkie then most likely you’ve been playing with FriendFeed. I am not going to debate here whether FriendFeed is good or evil, you can read my earlier commentary for those insights.

Last month Michael Arrington asked "Where’s Delicious 2.0?" In the post he explains that it’s been nine months since they first previewed the next release of the social bookmarking service but it’s still not live. We also learned last month that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter is leaving Yahoo. Will the Delicious 2.0 release ever make it to prime-time?

Had Delicious (and Yahoo) moved faster on the release could they have become what’s hot with FriendFeed today? I get that FriendFeed allows you to share your delicious bookmarks. But what I am talking about here is something much bigger strategically. By "sitting" on the release, the team lost their chance to move the strategy forward.

Delicious has "saving", FriendFeed has "liking". These are basically the same thing except that Delicious saves for the long-term and has tagging while FriendFeed is basically for the short-term. That’s where Delicious stops and FriendFeed picks up. FriendFeed aggregates more than just Web URLs by including many of the popular techie social networking services. FriendFeed also integrates a very simple message board.

Had Yahoo wanted to actually take their Delicious investment and do something with it, how hard would it have been to add the same functionality? If we look back a year, Delicious had a much larger "buzz share" than they do today. When I look at the CN logs, we rarely see any traffic from Delicious and haven’t had a frontpage link in probably nine months. Yet in the last week, I’ve seen way more traffic from FriendFeed. Yahoo’s Delicious service has a "close to mainstream" userbase and sure missed a golden opportunity to move forward – a fail whale if you will.

On the flip-side, should FriendFeed offer an option to categorize and save links and just crush Delicious to bits? Seems like it would be pretty trivial for FF to add this and would allow for both likes and saves options. Likes are to share with your network, saves are for you for the future.

If you look at the topic I’ve discussed here, it’s basically what Fred Wilson discussed when he wrote about stagnation when companies acquire startups. Who will come up next and displace Upcoming and/or Flickr as the techies choice?