Tag-friendly and social bookmarking service Delicious is headed for shutdown. Sure, you can export those bookmarks, but what if you want a new place to tag, save, share, and maybe go beyond what Delicious offered? These are your best bets.


Update: Good news! As it turns out, Delicious isn't shutting down after all—it's likely just being sold. But read on if you're still interested in some potentially better-for-you alternatives.


Best All-Around: Pinboard



Pinboard makes no bones about its role as a simple, tagged, social bookmarking service, one that's even more stripped down in interface than Delicious. Wondering about how it stacks up to Delicious, pro and con? Pinboard tells it pretty honestly, though, honestly, staying with Delicious isn't really an option, it seems. The team also forecasts its features, with a dig at Yahoo included.

Pinboard does charge for the service: $7.50 as this was written, but it goes up as more people join. At that level, you get a lot of great features above and beyond the Delicious-style bookmarking: automatic link de-shortening, automatic bookmarking of anything you save to Instapaper or Read It Later, archives of your links and favorites from Twitter, private tags that only you can see, and better bulk editing. For $25 per year, you can have Pinboard keep a copy of each page you bookmark, so that even dead links are readable, and have full text search of all those bookmarks, too. There are a good number of third-party Pinboard extensions and plug-ins out there, and likely one for your browser of choice.


Pinboard offers a full how-to section, including a full export/import walkthrough for Delicious users.

Best for Going Beyond Bookmarks: Diigo




Diigo is a bit more expansive in aim than Delicious. It doesn't just handle bookmarks, though it handles Delicious-style bookmarking, and straight imports from Delicious, fairly well. Diigo offers a lot of tools to accompany its service, including browser extensions and bookmarklets, and clients for Android, iPhone, and iPad that let you save your notes for offline reading in some cases.

Beyond basic bookmarking, Diigo offers a multi-color highlighting tool for browser-based research, and archiving of any bookmarked web page. There are lots of ways to collaborate with a group on notes and bookmarks, and the privacy settings are pretty Delicious-like and granular—you set which bookmarks are private or public, on a case-by-case basis.


You can see the cost of Diigo's basic, premium, and education-focused plans at this extensively detailed chart. They offer some basic importing explainers, but the How-To Geek's site has a nice step-by-step Delicious-to-Diigo walkthrough.

The Universal Capture Options: SpringPad & Evernote

Both services aim to be more than just a bookmark catalog service, but they can both does this job pretty well. They're also both moving quick to claim Delicious users as they look for a new home, though neither does quite an adequate job for Delicious power users:


Note, though, that these services are not necessarily made for such a use. They're generally aimed at wider use cases—what Adam calls "Everything Buckets", where a few bookmarks might get lost among photos of gift ideas, audio recordings, and other esoterica. But they can take in and hold your bookmarks, if you want a spot to toss them into, and they do support tagging.


Simple Backup (Without Tags): Xmarks & Mozilla Sync


As we detailed in a post yesterday, it's pretty easy to export Delicious bookmarks into your favorite browser. They arrive without tags, unfortunately, and they're only stored locally, unless your browser happens to sync its bookmarks, like Chrome. Keep your Delicious bookmarks safe (or at least safer) by backing them up to a cloud-based service. All you have to do is install Xmarks on any browser you happen to have, or Mozilla Sync if you happen to be a Firefox fan. Both services also offer means of syncing your bookmarks to your own server (we walked through Xmarks self-syncing recently).


Those are the services we see as the most receptive and accommodating to Delicious users. If you've found a great new home for your blue-and-white bookmarks, tell us about it in the comments.