It's been game over for Yahoo for a long-time. But the web gnome still has a few online features bringing in enough bucks to keep its head above water. Problem is as the tide of Google and Bing are washing them away bit by bit. Today YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired Delicious, the social bookmarking cloud service.
As part of a new company known as Avos the YouTube folks said: "We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web."With cloud quickly becoming the buzz word of the year Avos couldn't have timed the buy out any better. But you've got to wonder why Yahoo didn't have a go at sorting Delicious out themselves. The feature itself is in good hands though. The tech duo want to bring their wealth of experience from running masses of user-uploaded content on YouTube to the bookmarking field. They said they are "committed to running and improving Delicious going forward" and are "aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web."
Yahoo had acquired Delicious in 2005, but they wanted to shelf the project as they were apparently unable to adequately support the service. Delicious said existing user data will be preserved. However, it does require users sign in to the service and agree to have the data transferred before the handover in July this year.
We use the internet to share everything we do in life from how the weather is to what sandwich filling we're having for lunch, so it makes sense that companies are looking at how social networking can be used to by web users to chart their progression through the world wide web. You can tell a lot about a person by their bookmarks. What websites are you visiting at the moment? Obviously Gaj-it is in my bookmarks, there's also Sky News some other news and tech blogs, my University portal, kingoflimbspart2.com (a Radiohead news website based on rumours the latest album is a two part release) Part 2 of course has been denied but, I cling to false hope, there's also my political opinion website ultimatedystopia.
How about you?