The Delicious Death-Threat and What It Means for Our Development Process

It was only a matter of time before one of the free, third-party tools we rely on for much of our digital engagement bit the dust (or at least threatened to). Even better that it happened with a big, publicly-traded company.

We use Delicious to inventory and creatively re-purpose everything our visitors blog about us. We put pictures and tweets and links to blog posts from visitors on our homepage and several exhibit websites. Delicious was an ideal solution for curating and cataloging these online mentions because there’s a great Firefox extension that makes it very easy to incorporate into my daily workflow and because Delicious is incredibly extensible, serving up any combination of tags (e.g. pictures + albertosaurus vs. mommy blogger videos) to any combination of webpages easily.

We rely on third-party websites for many things. Some serve as tools, like Delicious, and others serve as communities, like Flickr Plant Project or our Facebook fan page. If Flickr dies, we’re not going to build a way to serve up pictures of our plants. We’re going to pay close attention to the community of plant lovers on Flickr and go where they go to put up our pictures of plants. If a third-party community website dies, we will follow the community.

But if a threatened third-party site is a tool, we need to be prepared to rebuild and maintain it ourselves. Third-party tool development is a quick, free way to prototype new uses of technology and we’re not about to ease off in our adoption. But the death-threat of Delicious made me realize that we need to incorporate a stage of assessment for these tools so that when we begin to depend on them, we take the next step in development to ensure their resiliency.