Delicious (stylized del.icio.us) was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011, and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year. In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc. In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service. On June 1, 2017, Delicious was acquired by Pinboard, and the bookmarking service was discontinued in favor of Pinboard's paid subscription-based service until it was bought by Maciej Ceglowski in 2020. Functionality Delicious used a non-hierarchical classification system in which users could tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag was available; for instance, the URL http://delicious.com/tag/wiki displayed all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature made it possible to view bookmarks added by other users. Delicious also allowed users to group links with similar topics together to form a "Stack", and include title and descriptions for the Stack page. Stacks could be worked on collaboratively with other users, and could be followed and shared with other users. Stacks were added in September 2011 and removed in July 2012. Delicious had a "hotlist" on its home page and "recent" pages, which helped to make the website a conveyor of Internet memes and trends. Users could also explore stacks on the home page by navigating categories such as Arts & Design or Education. All bookmarks posted to Delicious were publicly viewable by default, although users could mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks were private by default. The public aspect was emphasized; the site was not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections. Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature could be used to display bookmarks on weblogs. History The precursor to Delicious was Muxway, a link blog that had grown out of a text file that Schachter maintained to keep track of links related to Memepool. In September 2003, Schachter released the first version of Delicious. In March