Web 2.0 era social bookmarking service Delicious is no longer. The pioneering site is set to shut down after being acquired by a company called Nine Fives Software Inc. that runs a competing service called Pinboard.

Founded in 2003, Delicious, originally styled as del.icio.us, was a service that allowed Internet users to bookmark sites they found interesting and share those bookmarks with other users. It thrived for awhile in a period well before Mark Zuckerberg allegedly borrowed the idea for Facebook Inc., and even before MySpace was a big thing.

While MySpace was ultimately acquired and destroy by News Corp., Delicious went down the more common path of startup destruction via Yahoo Inc., which acquired the site in 2005 for between $15 million and $30 million. At its peak in around 2008, Delicious had 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked webpages. But by then Facebook had emerged from being a college service and was well on its way to being the social media giant it is today, negating the need for a site that existed only for people to share sites they like.

Delicious changed hands multiple times before its demise, sold by Yahoo to AVOS Systems Inc. in 2011, which attempted to relaunch the site, but then sold it to another company called Science Inc. in 2014. In 2016, a new company called Delicious Media Inc. had taken control of the site but had no more luck running it than the previous owners had.

In a blog post, Pinboard Founder Maciej Ceglowski wrote that “Delicious has over a billion bookmarks and is a fascinating piece of web history. Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard to keep Delicious down. I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.”

Delicious users, as few as there likely are today, can migrate their accounts to Pinboard, though not for free. The new owner, which appears to be primarily a Delicious clone, is charging $11 a year for the privilege.

The price of the acquisition was not officially disclosed, but The Next Web reported that Pinboard paid a paltry $35,000 for a site that will always hold fond memories for those who were around when it was first launched.

Image: rmlowe/Flickr