Via Dare, I came across a number of comments on the Yahoo acquisition of del.icio.us. This one from Ari Paporo really stood out though - especially this:

To start, we launched Blink with a bevy of marketing dollars and a message very much focused on the individual storage benefits. We were very successful at attracting users ( at its height Blink has 1.5 million members, del.ico.us currently has 300,000 ) and getting them to import their bookmarks into our system.

What I find interesting about this pair of posts is the thought that a company that had 5 times the user base of del.icio.us could be considered a failure while del.icio.us is not. This makes me wonder what defines success here...That the VCs made a profit? I assume that must have been the case with the del.icio.us sale while it clearly was not with the original Blink.com service. Perhaps it's that the founders end up as millionaires? What ever it is, it definitely doesn't seem to be about users.

I tend to agree with Anil Dash, del.icio.us isn't yet a success except for being successful at making the founders and VCs a good return on their investment. If a service can grow to be 5 times as large and still be considered a failure then I think it is safe to say that calling del.icio.us a success is at best premature.

Wow, I remember making fun of Blink "back in the day", but I had no idea they had grabbed so many more users than del.icio.us. I'd call it a success for a simple reason though - they got bought by Yahoo, and Yahoo can fold the service into things that make money. Sobering reading though - for all the hype, I never would have guessed that the user penetration was lower than Blink's.