Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us

HellSpam writes "The developers at del.icio.us have announced that they were purchased by Yahoo!. From the post: 'We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We're excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)'" For background on this purchase, carre4 writes "Stuart Maxwell, Jeff Barr, and Yahoo! team's Jeremy Zawodny recently did an interview explaining What's so cool about del.icio.us, in which Jeremy gave a non-committal answer about Yahoo acquiring del.ico.us"

Comments

Accounts

[willscott]

So what will this mean about current accounts, what is the migration expected to be? and congrats to the del.icio.us guys for getting this buisness built up in under a year!

And...

[Chris Bradshaw]

Google Bookmark (Beta) coming soon....

Re:And...

[rblum]

1: inject delicious with banner/image/animated/otherwise intrusive advertising

Hm. Strange. I don't see that on Flickr - what makes you think it'l be on del?

2: overbrand it against the original (ie the Y! logo on each page...)
Looking at Flickr, again, it's at the bottom of each page. Sure kill to look at a logo in exchange for a free service. Especially if it's at the bottom of the page...

3: start tracking and analyzing people's bookmarks more for their search
You're not exactly getting forced to share your bookmarks. They could've just crawled del instead of buying them.

4: enforce limits on the number of bookmarks that people can have, or charge for "premium" services (del.icio.us right now is unlimited bookmarks, free.)
Based on what information? Oh, you're making this just up? Sorry, must've missed that.

5: and worst of all, make us merge our yahoo and del.icio.us accounts.

Again, looking at Flickr, that didn't happen. And if it does, I'm not entirely unhappy. I don't want hundreds of online identities.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

5: and worst of all, make us merge our yahoo and del.icio.us accounts.

At least if Google comes out with bookmarks, they're sure to do a better job ;-)

How is that any different from your GMail Account AKA Google Account?

Catch 22 and welcome to web 2.0

Re:And...

[KiloByte]

2: overbrand it against the original (ie the Y! logo on each page...)

This alone is a significant blow. And I don't mean the name "Yahoo", I mean "Yahoo!" -- having an exclamation mark as a part of a name is both awful and it confuses people a lot.

Even the header of this very /. story appears mangled. "Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us" -- it's two sentences, right?

Yahoo Is Evil

[meehawl]

Notwithstanding the booster drivel, it both amuses and saddens me that "Web 2.0" is indeed turning out to be just another exit strategy and hype spew for tool makers, as many people said all along.

Yahoo is where good ideas go to die in its evil, uncaring corporate bosom of anti-user hostility. EGroups. Geocities. Broadcast. The list goes on and on.

"When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements - the invention of some new valve or sprocket - while remaining heedless of the world's barbarism"
(Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot)

The young and the naive at least have an excuse for credulous optimism. Those old enough to know better usually *do* know better, but have a vested interest in the whole bubble boosterism.

I see a trend

[giorgiofr]

EBay buys Skype. Yahoo buys del.icio.us and konfabulator before that. Adobe buys Macromedia.
Is this the end of the good times? Are we witnessing the beginning of the "real" internet business, where there is no space for startups and the only players have to be the huge ones? I don't say this in a damn-the-megacorps way. I am just worried that this kind of business is finally becoming... well pretty much like EVERY business out there.
Any thoughts?

Re:I see a trend

[ergo98]

Is this the end of the good times? Are we witnessing the beginning of the "real" internet business, where there is no space for startups and the only players have to be the huge ones?

Are you new to the internet? This is exactly what happened during Bubble 1.0: All of the big, established companies were desperately fearful that they were going to miss out on whatever the up and comers were doing, so they bought them up left and right. The reality is that such is a great time for small startups because they don't have to bother with silly things like revenue models or rational business plans - Just try to pay the bills long enough to get bought out by Yahoo/Google/Microsoft/Ebay and then let them deal with it. Eventually big business will find that a lot of them were, for lack of a better word, fads (podcasting, for instance, has incredibly limited real-world potential, but by the talk you'd think we're soon going to listen to every dweeb with a microphone) in an anti-revenue space, and they'll abandon them.

Rinse and repeat.

Re:I see a trend

[drinkypoo]

Short answer to your question: No.

Medium-length answer to your question: When Microsoft runs out of startup companies to buy, I'll start worrying.

Slightly long answer: Of course not. It is well-known that bureaucracy stifles invention, it's one of the basic tenets of business. This is why (to refer to answer #2) Microsoft keeps buying companies all the time - it's a lot easier than trying to out-innovate the world. There will always be new fruit to pick, and people coming up with new and inventive ways to pick it. These companies will always be attractive purchases for the megacorporations for two reasons which should be perfectly obvious to anyone with more than one neuron but I will enumerate them anyway. First, they add value to their own products/brand. Second, it stops that company from competing and prevents anyone else from buying them. Thus it's both an investment and an insurance policy.

Re:I see a trend

[That's Unpossible!]

Are we witnessing the beginning of the "real" internet business, where there is no space for startups and the only players have to be the huge ones?

Delicious could have said no, we aren't selling. It's not like Yahoo forced them to sell. So how exactly did you come to the conclusion that the only players are the huge ones? Delicious was a player.

Re:I see a trend

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean, no space for startups? Looks more like good times for startups to me. Hey, I wouldn't mind being paid millions for making some scripts popular.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Any bets how long until we'll be forced to change our login there and get one of the ridiculous yahoo accounts?

Urgh. *goes export his del.icio.us bookmarks*

Flickr.icio.us, anyone?

[ewg]

Flickr.icio.us, anyone?

Yet another free service that'll become useless?

[vfwlkr]

Except that it all web2 hype even before Yahoo acquired it. Now that's its been Yahoo'd, it going to become completely irrelevant

There's a fundamental difference between how Yahoo and Google approach a new service:
Yahoo: How do we milk this thing?
Google: How does this benefit our end users?
Not convinced: How many clicks to read new Gmail, and how many to read yahoo mail? And how many ads in each? Or compare blogger to Yahoo360.

Yahoo acquiring a web2.0 hyped servie, is an oxymoron. The web2.0 folks, atleast claim to making stuff easier for end users. Yahoo, on the other hand, works on the exact opposite philiosophy. What's the point of this acquisition then?

Re:Yet another free service that'll become useless

[FatRatBastard]

What's the point of this acquisition then?

Tagging, pure and simple. It has nothing (or very little) to do with how many ads Yahoo wants to throw at you. Yahoo isn't looking to simply buy eyeballs to boost their ad revenues. Yahoo believes that it can best Google by having humans tag information as opposed to algorithms tag information, which is the way (apparently) Google currently orders the web. This is why Yahoo purchased Flickr, and I suspect it will be the foremost driver of future acquisitions.

It will be interesting to see which philosophy, if any, is "better."

They want the del.icio.us user base

[BigCheese]

Yahoo already has a nearly identical service. It works but, there is not much of a community behind it since there was no compelling reason to leave del.icio.us to use Yahoo bookmarks.
They're buying del.icio.us for the community not the technology.

Fascinating social experiment

[jmenon]

Don't you think it's really interesting that the moment something like del.icio.us is bought, the knee-jerk reaction of most of us can almost be counted on to follow this pattern:

(i) How do I get away from them?
(ii) When is Google going to welcome me home?

I think it is amazing how much trust we automatically place in Google. I always find myself thinking, "Oh, Google wants this information about me? Sure, here you go. Have my phone number and social security number too."

Honestly, if Google offered an on-line password-management service, millions of us would flock to it. But if Yahoo! or Microsoft, or any other company did it? Forget it.

And all this for a company who scans our email in order to serve us ads. Someone should do a sociological study of this phenomenon.


This is trust, this is customer loyalty, this is why Google just...

...just wins.