This is just dripping with irony:
VentureBeat has learned that job search startup Simply Hired has laid off approximately 20 percent of its staff, according a source close to the company
But wait, there’s more:
In a second case of irony, Simply Hired owns the website www.simplyfired.com. When you go to simplyfired.com, the site re-directs to simplyhired.com. With regard to the layoffs, that’s unfortunate.
I can’t tell you how upset this makes me. Delicious has been my go to site for years, since it first was released, to find great links and information, as well as to keep track of links that are important to me or need to get back to later on. I have been a loyal user of the service for years. It has been my database of links in the cloud…when I needed to find that demo on a random blog for JQuery scripts, or a tutorial on how to use CSS. Hell, I taught myself HTML, CSS, and to a lesser degree, PHP, using sites I had bookmarked on Delicious. I could not have done that without Delicious. There is no way. With Delicious, if I stumbled on a site but didn’t have the time to go deep (which happened more times than not), I could save it and get back to it. Otherwise, I would have been searching all over the place. In many ways for me, Delicious was the precursor to Instapaper and Evernote.
From Andy Baio:
Just leaked: Yahoo! is closing or merging Del.icio.us, Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog, and many more. http://yfrog.com/h3z89p
12.16.2010 via @waxpancake
As John Gruber just said, it was only a few short years ago when Yahoo was the place to go for start ups such as Upcoming, Delicious, and Flickr to name a few. And with Tomas Hawk’s recent flame of Yahoo!’s Carol Bartz, where he begs and pleads for her to put some attention into sites like Flickr, you have to really be concerned that some of the most iconic properties on the internet, Yahoo included, are on the chopping block or at least life support.
But it goes beyond this. When Delicious launched, they brought to the masses one of the most significant and innovative elements of the web – they readily and in a dead simple way, enabled users to use “tags†to describe the links they saved. The implications of this were staggering. And what was more, they did so in a semantic manner. If you used Delicious twice or more, you pretty easily figured out that if you typed delicious / tag / [any word here] into your browser, you would get all the links relative to that keyword or tag. That combination was a game changer in my mind. Others may have done bits and pieces of that, but Delicious pulled it all together.
RIP Delicious. I am pissed. I think Yahoo may have just lost me for good. This is a sad, sad day.
You can click here to Export your years and years of links up at Delicious. Thankfully they are an open platform and freely let you export your data.
Another downturn in the economy, another rung falls off the career ladder. An interesting article over at the HBS blog argues that the current staffing cuts and furloughs that have been executed by multitudes of companies in this recession is taking us one big step further away from the antique concept of the 5 day, 40 hour work week.
But the idea of furloughs, particularly for managers and professionals, is planting the seed of a new way of looking at work in our minds. Suddenly companies have asked us to work, say, 32 hours a week rather than 40. Hmmm. What does that really mean? Most of us were never working 40 hours – we might have been working 50 or maybe even 60. We were answering emails at odd hours, writing in the early hours, calling Singapore at night. Does this mean that we should now work 20% less than we were before . . . or does it mean we should work literally 32 hours?
For many, I believe the conclusion will be that we should work the hours specified by the company and perhaps do other things – start new businesses on the side perhaps, sell stuff on eBay, take another job, go back to school, whatever – with the other time.
This shift sits well with many in Gen X who have already tended to bind their involvement more carefully than have the all-out Boomers. But for both generations, it will be a new way to look at work – another step on the slippery slope of recessionary lessons moving us from (1) you don’t have a job for life, to (2) you may never find full time work with one employer, to now (3) even a full-time job is really only a contractor job in disguise.