Apparel Search on Delicious
Social bookmarking for fashion pages
Delicious was a social bookmarking service: instead of saving a web page in one browser on one machine, a user tagged, saved, managed and shared it from a centralized source, reachable from any computer. Apparel Search took part in the service as one of the fashionable networks where fashion readers could keep and share the pages they valued - a natural extension for a directory whose whole purpose is collecting useful fashion links.
The idea sounds ordinary now because every platform absorbed it, but at the time it changed research habits. A sourcing manager's saved factory pages, a student's trend references or a shopper's wishlist could live in one synced set, tagged in the saver's own words and visible to a community saving related pages.
Bookmarking and the Social Pages
One Set of Bookmarks, Everywhere
The core promise was portability. Bookmark any site on the Internet and get to it from anywhere: Delicious kept a single set of bookmarks in sync between all of a user's computers, ending the familiar problem of the perfect supplier page saved on the office machine and needed at home. Even on a computer the user did not own, the bookmarks were waiting on the Delicious website itself.
Tags were the organizing principle. Rather than filing a page in one folder, a saver could attach several descriptive words, so a wholesale dresses page might sit under sourcing, dresses and a city name at once. For fashion research - where a page can be simultaneously a manufacturer, a style reference and a regional lead - that flexibility fit the material better than a rigid folder tree.
Discovery Through Other People's Saving
The social half of social bookmarking was discovery. Because saves were public by default, the community's collective tagging greatly improved how people discovered, remembered and shared on the Internet: a page saved and tagged by many people was probably worth reading, and following what knowledgeable users collected in a niche surfaced resources no search ranking would have volunteered.
That is the environment Apparel Search joined. The guide's own trade is curation - finding, checking and arranging fashion links - so a service built from millions of individual acts of curation was familiar territory. Readers who bookmarked Apparel Search pages on Delicious were, in effect, shelving the directory inside their own research collections, tagged for the day the information was needed again.
The Service's History
Delicious was founded in 2003 as a social bookmarking service and passed through several ownerships as the social web consolidated. In early 2011 it was acquired from Yahoo! by AVOS, a company helmed by the YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, and the site was rebuilt from the ground up and re-launched in fall 2011 with a new focus on curation and discovery - a recognition that saving links mattered most when it helped people find new ones.
On June 1, 2017, Delicious was acquired by Pinboard, and the bookmarking service was discontinued in favor of Pinboard's paid subscription-based service. As of August 2019, the site is inactive. The Apparel Search presence there belongs to that closed chapter: the account and its shared bookmarks were part of the service while it operated, and this page remains as the record of how the guide took part.
Why Bookmarking Mattered to Fashion
Fashion work generates links the way it generates samples. Trend references, factory pages, trade show listings, size charts, care guides and store pages pile up across a season, and the value of each one is highest weeks after it was found - exactly when an unsorted browser history fails. A tagged, synced, searchable bookmark collection turned that pile into a personal reference shelf, and the shared tags of a whole community turned private shelves into a discovery engine.
The habit outlived the service. Saving, tagging and sharing pages is now built into browsers, phones and every social platform, including the other networks in this About section. Delicious is where much of the fashion web first practiced it at scale, and where Apparel Search readers practiced it alongside the guide.
Common Questions
What was Delicious?
A social bookmarking service that let users tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source, with one set of bookmarks kept in sync across all of a user's computers.
What happened to Delicious?
After its 2011 acquisition from Yahoo! by AVOS and a ground-up relaunch focused on curation and discovery, it was acquired by Pinboard on June 1, 2017 and the bookmarking service was discontinued; the site has been inactive since 2019.
Why did Apparel Search use a bookmarking service?
Because the guide's work is collecting useful fashion links - a bookmarking community let readers save, tag and share Apparel Search pages inside their own research collections.