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Timeline

The arc of saving links in public, from the first shared bookmark services to the shutdowns of 2025 — every entry with its source and its confidence grade.

Published 2026-08-06 · 29 sources · Status of facts checked 2026-08-06

Entries carry the same confidence grades as the Ledger. An entry with no flag is sourced to a primary or contemporaneous document. A flagged entry rests on a single secondary source and is marked so a reader can weigh it. Claims that could not be sourced at all are not here — they are on the unverified list.

  1. 1996-04 (approx.)

    itList launches — generally cited as the first shared online bookmarks service, three years before the venture-funded first wave (Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks) that died with the dot-com crash. (medium confidence)

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

  2. 2003-09

    Joshua Schachter launches del.icio.us (with Peter Gadjokov). It pioneers tagging and popularises the term 'social bookmarking'.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

  3. 2004-12-05

    Digg launches (company founded November 2004), bringing user voting rather than tagging to link sharing.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

  4. 2005-06-29

    Yahoo launches My Web 2.0, its own social bookmarking and 'social search' product — six months before it bought del.icio.us.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Web and https://techcrunch.com/2005/06/29/profile-yahoo-my-web-20/

  5. 2005-10-07

    Google Reader launches through Google Labs — the RSS half of the same era's save-and-organise habit.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader

  6. 2005-12-09

    Yahoo acquires del.icio.us. The price was never officially disclosed; Pinboard's later write-up puts it 'somewhere between $15-$30M'.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) and https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/

  7. 2006-10-23 / 2006-10-24

    Google launches Google Co-op, and Custom Search Engine the following day — the platform the 2007 infopirate.org page used to search fifty bookmarking sites at once. (medium confidence)

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Programmable_Search_Engine

  8. 2007-05-30

    eBay acquires StumbleUpon for over $75 million, when the service had roughly 2.3 million users.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon

  9. 2009-01-30

    Ma.gnolia suffers a catastrophic database and filesystem failure. The backup arrangement — a FireWire file sync with no integrity checking, no versioning and no restore test — did not work.

    Source: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/magnolia-wilts-with-no-backup/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma.gnolia

  10. 2009-02-17

    Larry Halff announces that Ma.gnolia's user data is irretrievable. Users recover fragments only from third-party caches and feeds.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma.gnolia and https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/19/magnolia-data-is-gone-for-good

  11. 2009-03-18

    Yahoo shuts down My Web, announced the previous month.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Web

  12. 2009-04-09 (April 2009)

    Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and outside investors buy StumbleUpon back from eBay for $29 million. (medium confidence)

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon

  13. 2009-04-17

    Furl shuts down after Diigo bought it from LookSmart in March 2009; bookmarks are migrated into Diigo.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furl

  14. 2009-07

    Maciej Cegłowski launches Pinboard as a deliberately paid, ad-free, one-person bookmarking service.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website)

  15. 2010-08-25

    Digg launches v4. The redesign is 'marred by site-wide bugs and glitches'; traffic falls about a quarter within a month while Reddit grows sharply that year.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

  16. 2010-12-16

    A leaked internal Yahoo product slide showing Delicious in a 'sunset' column is posted publicly. Delicious responds the same week that it is not shutting down but is looking for a home outside Yahoo.

    Source: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/

  17. 2011-04-27

    AVOS Systems — the company of YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen — acquires Delicious from Yahoo. (medium confidence)

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

  18. 2012-07

    Digg is broken up and sold: brand, site and technology to Betaworks for about $500,000; the patent portfolio to LinkedIn for about $4 million; fifteen staff to the Washington Post's Code3 project for about $12 million.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

  19. 2013-03-13 → 2013-07-01

    Google announces the discontinuation of Google Reader on 2013-03-13 and shuts it down on 2013-07-01; Takeout exports of Reader subscription data remained available until 2013-07-15.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader and https://martech.org/google-to-close-google-reader/

  20. 2014-05-08 (announced; reported as completed 2014-05-11)

    Science Inc., Michael Jones's Santa Monica technology studio, acquires Delicious from AVOS Systems for an undisclosed sum. (medium confidence)

    Source: https://www.finsmes.com/2014/05/science-acquires-delicious-from-avos-systems.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

  21. 2016-01-11

    Delicious passes to Delicious Media, a new company formed between Science and Domainer/Domainersuite, which rolls back the most recent product changes. (medium confidence)

    Source: https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/12/delicious-former-web-2-0-darling-is-now-managed-by-new-alliance-rolls-back-most-recent-changes/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

  22. 2017-06-01 → 2017-06-15

    Pinboard buys Delicious and announces it will go read-only on 2017-06-15: no new bookmarks, no API, but the site stays online. Cegłowski explicitly tells users there is no time pressure to migrate.

    Source: https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/

  23. 2018-04-25

    Ad-tech company BuySellAds acquires a majority stake in Digg, taking on its editorial and revenue teams.

    Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/buysellads-acquires-digg

  24. 2018-06-30

    StumbleUpon shuts down after about sixteen years; accounts are migrated to Mix.com, built at Garrett Camp's studio Expa.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon

  25. 2019-03

    CiteULike ceases operation, announced in February 2019 — closing the academic branch of the 2004 bookmarking cohort. (medium confidence)

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteULike

  26. 2023-12-18 → 2025-01-08

    Google announces the Custom Search Site Restricted JSON API is transitioning to Vertex AI Search; Google's own documentation states the endpoints ceased serving traffic on 2025-01-08.

    Source: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/site_restricted_api

  27. 2025-03-05

    Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian reacquire Digg, twenty years after Rose founded it.

    Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/kevin-rose-and-alexis-ohanian-acquire-digg/

  28. 2025-05-22 → 2025-07-08 → 2025-10-08

    Mozilla announces on 2025-05-22 that Pocket will shut down; the service stops working 2025-07-08; user data exports remain available until 2025-10-08, after which accounts and data are deleted.

    Source: https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/22/mozilla-announces-shutdown-of-pocket/

  29. 2026-01-20

    Google announces that new Programmable Search Engines may search a maximum of 50 domains and that the 'Search the entire web' option is no longer available for new engines; operators of existing engines exceeding 50 domains or using the full web index must migrate by 2027-01-01, with Vertex AI Search offered as the paid replacement. (medium confidence)

    Source: https://programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com/2026/01/updates-to-our-web-search-products.html (post title and date) and https://www.heise.de/en/news/Google-is-discontinuing-its-free-web-search-index-for-developers-11152411.html