My delicious.com tag cloud

A holiday for Social Bookmarking

When I posted recently on the use of social bookmarking tools, I commented that Delicious (http://www.del.icio.us/) was not as popular as I thought and was ranked just outside the top 1000 most highly used sites on the Internet. Since then I've been keeping an eye on the popularity of this site using Alexa, the Internet's dominant traffic analyis & benchmarking tool.

It seems the usage of del.icio.us (now renamed to http://www.delicious.com/) is fading as a proportion of total internet usage.... following a spike of usage in June.

Why? Surely the use of social bookmarking tools should be increasing?

At first, I thought this was because users might have moved from Delicious to http://www.stumbleupon.com/, but a quick look shows that they are having a similar decline and Digg is faring even worse.

So what's up? Has Social Bookmarking usage peaked already? If the proportion of users for both service have dropped since mid-June, have they stopped for a reason?

Here's a theory.... aren't the Millenials on holiday?