UPDATE: Actually Yahoo is not really going to shut it down, just trying to sell it to another company, but all the warnings about hosting in the cloud are still valid.

I just read that Yahoo is shutting down Delicious. Despite the fact that now I have to find another way to keep all my bookmarks online this raises another interest question:

Do you trust the Cloud?

Everyday there are services that are shut down, like it happened with Geocities and is probably going to happen with Google Wave, but when it happens with popular services the disappointment is even higher.

Everybody is using Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Dropbox, Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Flickr, Vimeo (and probably now a lot more will use Google Bookmarks), some just for fun, but some of these online free services are becoming are so deeply integrated with our life and work that will be difficult to replace them in case some their owner decide to shut them down.

To be cloud-shutdown proof we should make a list of all the “free” services we are using and that we really rely upon, and always have a backup plan to face the event one of them gets shut down or becomes unusable.

This is easier said than done, but if you sit down and plan ahead, this will save you a lot of time and panic when Google decide to shut down GMail (yes, it’s not a mistake, Google will shut down GMail, maybe in 10 year, but it will happen).

Moving away from Delicious

But now, how to solve the immediate problem of replacing Delicious? Here are some links I found that might help:

Probably the easiest way out now is to use Google Bookmarks or I might even try the all European (despite the name) Mister Wong bookmark sharing site.