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

simpy

[jambay]

i like http://simpy.com/ for social bookmarking. i've found it to be a good delicious alternative.

Re:simpy

[otisg]

Hey, I like Simpy, too, and apparently a the Slashdot crowd suddenly loves it as well. For those new to Simpy - you can pull your del.icio.us bookmarks into Simpy through Simpy's third party support. And don't forget to tag your Mom 2.0.

And...

[Chris Bradshaw]

Google Bookmark (Beta) coming soon....

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: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.

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

[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."

del.icio.us and Katrina PeopleFinder

[wayward]

The Katrina PeopleFinder project http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/Katrina_Peo pleFinder_Project was a group of volunteers who put together data from numerous Katrina sites. The team members used del.icio.us to add and tag links to sites with survivor/missing data. It was really a good resource, and the PeopleFinder project ultimately gathered over 640000 records and supported over a million searches.

The deal may be delicious...

[digitaldc]

...but did it go down smoothly?

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.'

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?

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:Accounts

[tommers]

It took about two months before Yahoo created dual logins for flickr and they say users will have to migrate by sometime in 2006. Probably a similar timeframe here. Especially since this integrates with Yahoo 360, My Web 2.0 in much more immediate ways than Flickr did.

Re:So...

[GweeDo]

Don't you mean "rid.iculo.us" yahoo accounts?

all your base...

[Anonymous Coward]

belong.to.us

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.