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Since when is this news?
About 20 minutes ago :-)
Check out joshu's profile.
I suspect he knows. cdibona is no slouch, either:-)
Is it true that Google doesn't hire "idea guys"?

From: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

Interestingly, Google was both least aggressive and least attractive to Schachter. When he'd interviewed for a job there, the company had told him, "We don't need idea guys--we've got plenty of them. We just need developers."

That was a very, very bad interview. Heilemann took two different interviews, 8 months apart, and put them together. With a variety of innaccuracies.

Anyway, some engineer told me that in an interview at some point.

Why not go back to the drawing board and build a better version of delicious? Surely the non-compete has already expired.

If he comes out with a new delicious like product, he'd get a ton of press because of the whole "he sold, and his product was ruined, now he is back where he left of, " angle. So he'll have his big popular website again and a ton of money in his pocket.

Because then I'd be The Bookmarks Guy. Eugh
Why not work for a YC company or some other small startup instead of Google?
Someone else's startup? I want to be in charge of a product.

Google seems like a reasonable path to redemption - ship something new.

If I knew how to make something exceptionally better, I would do it. Most would appreciate it. There is much to be left untapped and I'm sure there are more ways to push it beyond "bookmarks", as social voting has already done.
I think about this every week. The Photos Guy?

Keep trying to do something new, but so much undone after Picasa.

And when you have a TON of stuff going into an acquisition that never sees the light of day, you kind of obsess about making it real, even 5 years later.

At least you got things shipped, Mike.

2+ years of sitting on my ass was not fun.

I had the same idea as vaksel. I am still a del.icio.us user, but the problem is, that Yahoo devs seems to not understand the product very deeply, since they did NOTHING to improve it, although a lot of work has been done. They just needlessly complicated the design and redirected the service to a boring domain name.

joshu I think there is still a room for you to to resume where you stopped and starting to truly innovate again. I would be your first user. ;o) Let's start with thinking of some good new quirky domain name. ;-))

The always-brilliant Maciej already did that :)

  http://pinboard.in/
  http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords
So far I have only reimplemented what Joshua had built a few years ago. If it weren't for the del.icio.us 2 redesign, I wouldn't have a market at all.
Is the pinboard.in reliable in terms of speed and uptime?
Stats in the DB show that the site has been fast (user page loads in about a quarter second) pretty much since launch. This is not due to developer skill; rather, the signup fee has kept the user base small enough to guarantee good performance, which is part of the idea.

As for uptime, we've had about 20 minutes of downtime this month, in order to set up a master/slave and enable SSL. I can't guarantee the happy streak will continue, but again the gatekeeping fee deters any massive spikes in load, spam, and other growing pains that could take down the site.

Please flag this thread. This is actually really rude, I think. It was part of another thread; leave it there.
On top of that, the lack of context and the formulation in the headline is making it sound like you regretted selling to Yahoo!, while the original post leads me to believe you actually regret selling. (You can correct me if I'm wrong, after all, you are the one that said it...)

This whole topic is in really bad taste :-/

No, the formulation is relatively accurate. Would someone have done better? Probably not.

I emailed pg and asked for the thread to be nuked.