Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Internet Tools
Yahoo buys del.icio.us
The grandaddy of all social bookmarking services, del.icio.us, has been acquired by Yahoo! Jeremy Zawodny, of the Yahoo! Search team, welcomed del.icio.us to the Yahoo! fold today, paying homage to "the cult-like following" del.icio.us enjoys. This is the second important community-based site acquired by Yahoo! this year. Back in March, Yahoo! bought the photo-sharing site Flickr. The power of community is what made del.icio.us and Flickr successful. The question is, can communities like these continue to thrive under a big corporate umbrella? How will Yahoo! integrate del.icio.us with its existing services, like Yahoo!'s social bookmarking service My Web 2.0, which is currently in beta? Like our sister site Download Squad, we'll be interested to see how this all plays out.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
J.T. Mill said 9:20PM on 12-09-2005
Who knows what the future holds, maybe del.icio.us will even get a name that actually describes it's service! I do have a quick question though: How exactally is this remotely Apple news?
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Derek said 9:33PM on 12-09-2005
To answer J.T.'s question, a lot of Mac users enjoy using del.idio.us and there is a well known program Cocoalicious. It has about as much relevance as Konfabulator.
I still don't hold much stock in Yahoo!'s acquisitions. I have not read any sort of vision or strategy that would explain these actions by Yahoo! In my opinion it seems like it's just a company with too much money trying to blindly capture and control the next hot market.
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Patrick said 10:11PM on 12-09-2005
I thought I was a Flockstar. Turns out I'm just a Yahooligan.
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DCE said 11:04PM on 12-09-2005
While it may not have been publicly communicated, I think this demonstrates a clear strategy on the part of Yahoo. With the purchase of del.icio.us they now control the two most prominent folksonomies (content organized by users via tags). A combination would amount to an impressive collection of content that has been evaluated and categorized not by a proprietary algorithm, but by an incredible mass of individuals.
You see where I'm heading with this?
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David Chartier said 2:41AM on 12-10-2005
I really hope del.icio.us prevails over MyWeb 2.0, as delicious's url scheme is a LOT friendlier. MyWeb tags, from what I remember, don't incorporate into their URL system at all; it just becomes a bunch of dynamic gobbly gook. Del.icio.us, on the other hand, works very, very well: del.icio.us/dcharti is my account, and subsequently del.icio.us/dcharti/Apple is my Apple tag, etc.
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fra said 4:57AM on 12-10-2005
well you you'r self are apart of AOL and we all still love the place.
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Martin said 6:03AM on 12-10-2005
The day they force me to create an Yahoo account to further use it, I am out of there as fast as I got out of flikr.
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Brad Proctor said 11:16AM on 12-10-2005
What is next Google to purchase digg.com?
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Dan Pritchard said 10:44PM on 12-10-2005
Yahoo will bring their candy-colored crap and their retarded-twelve-year-old fanbase to it and kill it slowly and painfully. They buy everything they can that's new/hip/cool, so they can suck the life out of it and kill it to stop it from competing against their legacy crap web services. They are especially hateful toward AJAX because Y! hasn't ever been able to figure it out, so they're bent on killing AJAX services like Flickr and now del.icio.us.
It was fun while it lasted, del.icio.us... anyone got an alternative for me to use?
PS: I almost forgot--the ADS! Here they come, people! As a poster on Zawodny's blog put it:
this is terrible news. please don't put giant flash banners and ads all over delicious. please.
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