YouTube founders acquire Delicious from Yahoo!

As you might or might not know, Yahoo! has been selling off its underperforming services in order to generate more profit, and it its latest sale, Delicious, the web-book marking service has been sold. The buyers? Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, none other than the founders of YouTube. Delicious will now become part of Avos, their new internet company.

They haven’t announced what they will be doing with the service, but at the moment it will continue to run. Yahoo! will remain in control of the service until July 2011, where Delicious’ transition to its new owners should be completed by then. No data will be lost as long as users remember to agree to their data being moved.

Yahoo! did the right thing in getting rid of Delicious, seeing how nobody was really using the service anymore – people are preferring other ways to share their links now, especially through social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook. But now it looks like Yahoo! is also unclear about what direction it’s going to take next. At the moment, Flickr seems to be its only source of hope but I don’t suppose one single service can keep the country’s biggest web portal afloat if a bigger and better rival comes along.

How many of you guys still use Delicious?

George Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: service, Yahoo, YouTube