Today’s comic features Yahoo employee Jonathan Snook and (former employee) Nicole Sullivan getting the Squirrel’s help in digging a fresh grave.

I use Delicious. (That link may not work much longer… Hooray for link rot.) A lot. Heck, just today I was updating my (last minute) Christmas wish list by cleverly attaching the “wishlist” tag to items I wouldn’t object to seeing in my stocking. Fellow Mindfly designer Erica literally shrieked when she learned of the site’s fate, and is now scrambling for some replacement location to store her lovely bookmarks.

I can’t say I know how Delicious was supposed to monetize, but I’m getting tired of the amount of future deadlinks Yahoo seems to be putting the world through, first with GeoCities and now Delicious (and others) and who knows what in the future. Flickr?

I hope not. I actually pay for Flickr. And how the heck else will I share my cute cat photos? Yfrog? Gag.

There’s options out there to export Delicious bookmarks into. I’m considering my options, but at the moment, Pinboard is getting a lot of recommendations on the tubes.

Rest in peace, Delicious. You didn’t deserve to die so young.

Today, Geocities dies a quiet whimpering death after fifteen years in operation. Along with millions of really bad web pages (such as ones I once made just after high-school involving neon colors and table-based ‘designs’), it dragged screaming into the void no doubt thousands of good web pages. Now, millions of links on the Internet point to nothing, to a void from which nothing returns. It’s not the link rot apocalypse, but it’s a small glimpse into what it could look like.

Jeremy Keith has made it very clear he’s mad about this, much more so than I could ever care to muster. I’m personally glad some of my past embarrassments are now quietly euthanized, but he likes to look at the long picture. This is a picture I can’t really bring into focus myself, but today’s comic (starring Jeremy) posits a future where, tragically, Geocities held a key we needed to save humanity.

When I look at this objectively (rather then in embarrassment at my own past efforts at web “design”) I’d have to say that the tragedy here is the loss of a large chunk of late-twentieth/early twenty-first century information about our society and culture. The Internet is notable for both its size and general lack of backups. The more of it we lose, the less our great-grandchildren will know about who we were. I don’t currently have children, but if I ever did, I’d like my descendants to know I spent a great deal of time obsessing over squirrels.

It’d be more than I know about my own ancestors.