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

Re:simpy

[TedCheshireAcad]

I prefer ctrl-D. No rounded box corners or pastel colors, but it works. To each his own, I guess.

Tagging vs. Searching

[Mean_Nishka]

This is a good acquisition for Yahoo. Makes a lot of sense since much of what del.icio.us is about is 'tagging' the web.

What's interesting is seeing the dynamic of Internet search philosphy developing here. Google's about 'searching' and Yahoo, it seems, is about 'tagging.'

Re:Tagging vs. Searching

[blahtree]

1) Google is about tagging too. Witness Gmail. Labels = tags.

2) Personally, I don't see tagging and searching as competing Internet search philosophies. One is the table of contents and one is the index. You use both, just at different times depending on your need.

Re:And...

[takeya]

Hopefully. I love del.icio.us but I am betting they are going to...

1: inject delicious with banner/image/animated/otherwise intrusive advertising
2: overbrand it against the original (ie the Y! logo on each page...)
3: start tracking and analyzing people's bookmarks more for their search
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.)
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 ;-)

Re:I see a trend

[Mr. Cancelled]

Are we witnessing the beginning of the "real" internet business, where there is no space for startups

I think you're misunderstanding a lot of the so called "startups". A lot of business's get started with the hope of being bought out by a big company.

Look at it this way:
Would you rather form a startup, work hard and sweat all your life hoping to eventually rival the giants in your field, or would you prefer to form a startup, work hard and sweat for a few years, until some big corporation sees the what you've achieved, and gives you a big paycheck, effectively buying out your company?

While I can appreciate those who want to someday replace the Yahoo's, and Adobe's of the world, I myself would be more than happy to spend a few years toiling in the fields, if it meant a paycheck which would allow me to retire at the age of 40!

Not that del.icio.us was looking for the "big payoff", but your post seems to imply that being bought out is somehow akin to selling out (very similar to the rants you hear when a popular independant band signs on to a major label), which is something I disagree with. Having said that, I am rather interested in what yaho will do with the technology... I'm guessing we'll see some new enhancements to the Yahoo toolbar for starters. Something like "People who have enjoyed the page you're currently on have also enjoyed the following: www.xxx.com, www.yyy.com, etc."

Alternatives?

[edmicman]

What are the alternatives since everyone (both here and digg) seem to be bitching a whole lot about it? Is there a free/open source something you can install on your own server? It seems like a simple enough concept, I would think someone had already copied it by now.

Re:Accounts

[Bogtha]

Registered are nothing: they don't necessarily buy, click on links, etc... So what's the big deal?

Aren't Yahoo famous for their "portal" and web directory? It seems to me that right now it's a fairly good indicator of what pages are popular and have good content, which is valuable to Yahoo.

Apart from anything else, Yahoo could simply correlate what you bookmark with what other people bookmark, and suggest websites to you based on shared interests. That adds value to their portal.

On the other hand, if Yahoo start mining this data, spammers will quickly catch on and start "bookmarking" their own sites, so it's not all smooth sailing.

Re:I see a trend

[giorgiofr]

but your post seems to imply that being bought out is somehow akin to selling out

No, not really, that's not what I meant. I just thought it would become harder to start a new business as a small player if everybody else is huge. And yes, it might be better to sell and retire at 40, but I don't know for sure... I guess it depends on what your goals are.

Some offline application maybe?

[vitalyb]

I love the concept of Delicious.
However, I really hate how I have to wait everytime I want to search/edit my bookmarks. I really wish that there was some kind of external app (Powermarks style) that let me easily play with my bookmarks and update/sync from Delicious only in the background.

Anyone knows anything like that?