del.icio.us appears to be doing fine to me :/

I don’t know what Michael Arrington is smoking when he says quote they’ve tanked completely

By my internal counters, del.icio.us has well over 300k users who actively post bookmarks. This is different from Digg or really any of the social sites out there besides the picture and myspace sites – these are people who are actively contributing to the del.icio.us resource with quality stuff.

Digg is pretty ephemeral by comparison, with Diggs occupying a perhaps similar volume of traffic thanks to the easy button, but the tagging and focus on new content means that Digg traffic lives and dies quickly, which may account for why Digg has eclipsed del.icio.us in traffic.

However look at the contributor numbers, people have recently claimed that Digg only has a thousand or far fewer active bookmarkers, and my internal numbers from my feeds back that up. LiveMarks has scrolled 60k digg bookmarks, and 4 million unique del.icio.us links over the past year or so.

What really seems to have improved at del.icio.us since Yahoo bought them is something that Michael Arrington likely would have a hard time selling as copy: their performance has improved drastically from a near cataclysm of broken pages, timeouts and database failures that were striking del.icio.us shortly before they were sold.

The feature improvements have indeed been scarse and the design is still unfortunate, but it’s still the best public bookmarking service out there by far (of course the new boz is the first and best and only truly private bookmarking service :P)

Sometimes features and visible improvements take a long time to brew, such as before Flickr released their Gamma update. There is a ton of work that needs to be done on del.icio.us, but I wouldn’t count Yahoo as having killed the goose yet.

PS: The comscore high Arrington refers to is likely bumped artificially high by press regarding the Yahoo aquisition, not droves of users suddenly signing up and using the service.