I just got off an instant message conversation with Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us. I was asking him for any comment on the Yahoo acquisition rumors and he pointed me to the del.icio.us blog.
Yahoo has acquired Del.icio.us, which has approximately 300,000 users:
y.ah.oo!
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!)
We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way – our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.
I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!
Competition is such a wonderful thing. Yahoo, in addition to launching a flurry of new products in the last few months (and the pace seems to be accelerating), now owns the two most important tagging properties on the web – flickr and del.icio.us.
Congratulations, Del.icio.us. And Fred Wilson. And Josh Kopelman.
UPDATE: Jeremy Zawodny posts on the Yahoo Search Blog announcing the acquisition as well. “And as of today, del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo! family.”
Can’t really say I’m surprised, delicious was the perfect target for an acquisition. Lets hope this is the best move from Joshua.
Well, he’s probably just become very wealthy so I think that might be the best move for him.
Let’s hope that start merging all of the tagging engines together into one and we start to get some de facto tagging standards out of this.
This is great news for tagging and another blow to the text-search hypsters and SEO shills.
Yahoo moves validates that tagging is the direction of finding information online, not perl-era text-algorithms and bsRank patents.
You will find tagging to be the major theme in 2006 as ’search-engine’ technology will be exposed as nothing more than overrated, brute force text extraction.
YAHOO becoming COOL again… watch out, Google:-)
“Yahoo moves validates that tagging is the direction of finding information online, not perl-era text-algorithms and bsRank patents.”
Funny you should meantion that, because del.icio.us is written mostly in perl.
-ryan
Ed Dunn says:
“’search-engine’ technology will be exposed as nothing more than overrated, brute force text extraction.”
I think tagging is one of the coolest things in the universe. Part of what makes it cool is that it solves a simple problem. The way Ed and many in the Web2.0 world describe search, they paint it as simply an enabling technology that has been solved. Have these people used Google/Yahoo/Microsoft desktop search solutions? These steaming piles are clear evidence that search technology has a *long* way to go.
I have many GBs of data that I have collected over the last 15 years of digital living. Very little of this has been tagged. Very little of it is relevant. In the future, good organizational systems should automatically provide me access to all of that content, along with new, tagged content, along with every piece of content I ever view from this point forward, along with every piece of content that my closest friends view and don’t explicitly tag as private, along with every piece of content that my colleagues view and tag as public. This will be many GBs of content per week. I should be able to search it in seconds from my cell phone. Searching 100GB from a powerful laptop with 2GB of ram takes up to a minute. The search problem is so far from solved it isn’t even funny.
In a properly designed tool, tagging and search should *not* compete, they should complement each other. Tagging should optimize search performance and result sorting. Search should provide some degree of automatic tagging when I am not actively attentive to the content. Developments in either realm are exciting and often commercially valid.
That’s one thing I didn’t see coming… but certainly a good move for Yahoo. Hope Joshua got a good deal.
However, I still don’t take Yahoo seriously… regarding it more like a wealthy adolescent kid on a shopping spree.
Congratulations.. just don’t merge my account with Yahoo! like Flickr was forced to do!
Shouldn’t we be calling it: Yahoo.l.icio.us
What does this both for other social sites that interact with Delicious, like Simpy?
Congrats to Delicious.
The real question is: with the power of Yahoo’s consumer brand can they take delicious and flickr tagging to the masses?
How do they integrate all of these apps together into their “My web”?
There seem to be an awful lot of acquisitions in the web world lately. I’m not sure if consolidation is a good thing or not, but I do think it’s good news to see companies take an interest in start-ups again. This should spur more innovation online.
Yahoo seems to be going after tagging hard, buying both Flickr and Delicious, the premier tagging interfaces online today. There’s a good article at Business 2.0 about how Yahoo feels about Flickr and tagging.
http://www.busi...1129448,00.html
Basically, they are using it to combat Google and other mindless (that is, lacking a human’s mind) categorization of web pages. There’s no question that a database of human-tagged web pages would be more relevant for search, but Yahoo has to get a critical mass of tagged pages before it will take off. I don’t know how they do that, but for millions of users to voluntarily tag the pages they surf, Yahoo will need to lower the barrier for interaction significantly. Tagging will have to become a seamless part of the surfing experience.
It’s ironic in a way that Yahoo is really just going back to their roots: They started out as a human-edited directory of the web. But where they started with a rigid, hierarchically organized directory, they’re moving to a flat/shallow (i.e., not many levels deep. In this case, 1 level deep.) pluralistic directory.
Whatever happens, it will be exciting to watch.
I am appalled. I am so sick of these corporation collecting our cultural bits and turning them into pickpockets.
Flickr, after Yahoo bought them, got a hundred times worse. Ugly and corporate.
I can’t bear to look at mySpace now that I know that Rupert Murdoch is going to use it to support deeply conservative politics and, of course, pick my pocket.
There are a million of them as this consolidation hoovers up these things that we have allowed into our hearts. I understand that these people want a payday for their work but I think it’s greedy sellout time.
I think about the things that I like these days and feel like I want to cut them off before I become attached to their functionality and find it hard to do without as they start to use it against me.
At least I never got hooked on gMail.
tqii
Mike wrote “I just got off an instant message conversation …”
HAHAHA..I bet that make mainstream journalist cringe.
Yo.del.icio.us
i hope yahoo will continue with del.icio.us project and try to join it with flicr and other projects…
Well, for us at http://www.blinklist.com, at least it makes it very clear who we are competing with.
First off I would like to thank Josh, he has made Wharton proud one more time…GO WHARTON..hehehe! ok im done with the bias. The acquisition is a terrible thought and rationalization, but I will hold my breath until I hear the price paid!
Is anyone bold enough to guess how much money has been paid for delicious. 300k users. You wouldn’t think the’ve paid more thant US$10 per user – remember that is a completely free service, would you?
Does this mean my Del.icio.us bookmarks are going to feed into Yahoo’s search engine?
I’m going to check out del.icio.us – I am familiar with Flickr. Thanks for the good info!
Well let’s see what the future will bring for this tagging service.
an X-rated clone of delicious is gaining a lot of steam. http://digforporn.com boasted 100 new users on its first day in beta mode I heard. How will yahoo respond to this?
Most Search Engines and Online Bookmarking products are dangling carrots to make people bookmark their personal links on their sites.
LookupThis.com is not offering money or prizes but the real thing that no one is interested in offering.
“Advertising Space”
This space is made available directly to account holders of LookupThis.com and they can post any advertisement on the same. In fact the idea is you can sell this Ad Space to advertisers and make money.
So the more you bookmark and the earlier you bookmark on LookupThis.com the greater is the chance of your advertisement appearing on the Search Result Pages.
It is full democratic and transparent. The advertisement revenues earned from the AD Space is 100% yours as you directly sell the same to the advertiser not via LookupThis.com
We are simply giving you an opportunity to get paid for your efforts.
So when people search for “Music” or “MP3″ on Lookupthis.com and you have bookmarked the maximum number of links for this keyword, naturally your advertisement gets displayed.
So now there is an incentive for you to bookmark on LookupThis.com
now you don’t have to sign to del.icio.us to have a personal online bookmark,
what you only need is a pop3 account and bookmarkMail.
to add a bookmark you can send yourself an email with URL as a subject,
and you can fill the email body with the description.
and to see the result you can see it with bookmarkMail here,
and if you want to set up for your own server click here
some screenshot
1. send yourself an email
2. see your sent email in outlook(mail client)
3. login to bookmarkMail
4. see the bookmark