You have only one chance for a first impression, AVOS.

I have a weak spot for Delicious.
Delicious collected, curated, structured and archived almost 6000 links for me since July 2007. It was an invaluable source for pitches, best practices, industry reports and presentations. It is dead ugly, but extremely efficient.

So I felt extremely bad when rumors rose last December that Delicious would be shut down. I felt violates, didn’t trust Yahoo nor Delicious anymore.
So, I switched to Pinboard, which pretty much gave me a Delicious-ish system.

As bad I felt when I first heard Delicious would be should done, that happy I was yesterday when I heard the former founders of YouTube (now in their new company AVOS), bought my old love Delicious.

I felt excited and even considered switching back to Delicious. Those YouTube guys would most definately honour Delicious and would WOW me in killing my Pinboard account and returning to my precious, Delicious.

And maybe I set my expectations too high.
But AVOS blew it.

I got a decent (but pretty boring and unattractive) message announcing AVOS buying Delicious (left) and clicked to see a simple (and even more boring and unattractive) page that asked for my username and password (right).

After finishing the three input fields, I got a simple (and still unremarkable) thank-you page (right) and equally unremarkable thank-you email (right, bottom).
That was my first introduction to AVOS.

AVOS had the chance to WOW me. To send me a personal mail. To show some remarkable company culture. To give me a smile, surprise me with a twist. And they had the chance to craft a madly converting email.
They had the chance to email ALL Delicious users. To activate the Delicious fans, create a mailing worth sharing and worth talking about, re-activate sleeping accounts (like my own accounts) and leave a lasting impression.

They had the chance to catapult the unknown AVOS company into digital stardom.

And they chose to say “Thanks for Agreeing to the AVOS Terms of Service!”.

Please guys. You blew your only chance for a first impression.