On Thursday a leaked screenshot from an internal Yahoo meeting revealed that the company proposed to "sunset" its popular social bookmarking service Delicious. Users on Twitter and across the blogosphere went into meltdown: what would that mean to their carefully curated bookmarks? Would everything be lost? A campaign to #saveDelicious sprang up immediately and already there has been a petition to open-source it; a suggestion of a crowdsourced buy-out and even some calls for the library of Congress to archive it. So what is all the fuss about?

As a journalist who began work in a time BC (before computers) it is hard to believe that researching a topic often used to begin with a call to the information library to order a pile of cuttings. Long before the invention of social bookmarking, if we stumbled upon an interesting snippet in a paper we would cut it out or, following the advent of the internet and the miracle of email, we would send ourselves a link to the story and squirrel it away in "favourites", never to be looked at again. It was a virtual graveyard of lost information.

The answer to how to store and share information came with the launch of Delicious in 2003. Bought by Yahoo two years later, it rapidly became a social bookmarking giant and it was easy to see why. When singing its praises to trainees at the BBC College of Journalism I describe it as like tapping into a collective brain or having the keys to everyone's filing cabinets. It is simple, accessible, searchable and shareable. To a journalist it is invaluable.

Bookmarks can be stored online and are accessible from any computer anywhere in the world. Users can build a network of like-minded people and follow their tags or find experts in a given field and tap into their knowledge by searching a unique archive of clearly tagged items. You can monitor search terms or popular topics and have information delivered directly to your RSS reader, thus saving huge amounts of time. Delicious is also a superb collaborative tool for team working and training, so for example www.delicious.com/suellewellyn/cojosm contains links that could be useful to those attending my social media training sessions at the BBC College of Journalism (CoJo).

Social bookmarking for a curious journalist is like catnip and the moment I discovered Delicious I was hooked. A self-confessed information addict, I behave like a magpie collecting shiny little nuggets of interest and stashing them away for future reference. Features, blogposts, recipes and even internet fluff has all found its way into my hoard, which to date numbers well over 3,000 items. So you can imagine my horror when I, like millions of other Delicious users, thought it could be axed.

For 24 hours after the news leaked Yahoo said nothing – in spite of endless angry appeals for information from worried Delicious users. On Friday they confirmed that while "there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo, we believe there is an ideal home for Delicious outside of the company". But is it too late to save it and who would want to buy it now? Trust has been eroded and a mass exodus is underway as users exchange tips on how to export their bookmarks and move to other social bookmarking sites. Users have woken up to the fact that information is precious and that there are innovative alternatives like Pinboard and Diigo exist – that alone could spell disaster for Delicious.

Commentators writing on the influential TechCrunch blog accuse Yahoo of a lack of innovation and say the company is in "absolute disarray", a point echoed by one former Yahoo employee Jon Orlin, who says: "When you have 'the biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe' in a potentially very social product and you can't figure out how to run it in a lean, innovative and profitable way, it's a real sign you are in trouble." All of which leaves Delicious users feeling let down and anything but delicious.