From the NYT :
Fans of Delicious, an online bookmarking service, raised a ruckus after word leaked four months ago that its owner, Yahoo, might shutter it as part of a streamlining plan.
To deflect criticism, Yahoo quickly reassured users that it was trying to find Delicious a new home rather than kill it.
On Wednesday, Yahoo said that it had succeeded in finding a buyer — a team led by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the co-founders of YouTube. Their acquisition is a surprise move for the duo, who quietly left YouTube in the years after it was bought by Google five years ago for $1.65 billion.
From AllThingsD :
Joshua Schachter, who built social bookmarking site Delicious and sold it to Yahoo, has raised money for his next venture, which he’s calling…Tasty Labs. Get it?
Other than telling the world that Tasty Labs will put “the useful back into social software,” Schachter and his co-founders are being coy about what Tasty is up to. But they did announce today that they’ve taken an investment from Union Square Ventures, which backed Schachter’s first venture.
Though totally unrelated with this post, I do have to mention that the Delicious JavaScript is perfect to create a simple but complete customized linkblog on a single html page.
From the Delicious blog :
Have you seen random Delicious tiny URL’s floating around the ethos? Lonely Tweets with just a link and no text? We have too. When we implemented the Twitter feature to our ‘Save’ interface with a comment field beneath it for messages, we assumed everyone would use that comments field. As it turns out, we were wrong. It seems the assumption is that if there is no comment added, we should include the title of the bookmark. So, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing from now on. The comment field will remain as-is, but if you’re short on time or you think the title is the best explanation, feel free to leave the comment field empty and we’ll add the bookmark title for you.
Xmarks formely known as Foxmarks announced two days ago that they will close their door. The Delicious team has published a new blog entry and provides links to tools to import your Xmark bookmarks into Delicious.
Xmarks was great and made me fall in love with synchronization. But then Chrome and Firefox slowly replicated its features.
As promised we’ve just pushed live a few more changes that we’ve wanted to give you for a number of months. There are loads of minor UI and performance tweaks that most of you won’t notice, but there are some small things you might notice. Some of the minor changes include things like the ability to ‘Hide’ your fans list should any of them have embarrassing usernames, plus the ability to sign in as another user from the web-based save interfaces and main site. For those in the know, we’ve also added rel=”me” to the public profile URL, plus a plethora of other tweaks and fixes. Some of the larger changes include:
Well yeh that’s a prevision I’m making and to be fair it’s not a very difficult one. Everybody seems to be angry at Yahoo! shutting down MyBlogLog but well, I’m not so sure why. The widget was horrible and hideous. The service certainly was more flexible than Yahoo Profile but Yahoo! could clearly not continue using both. At least they took off the peanut butter quite quickly compared to other services…
… like bookmarks. So yes Yahoo! is gonna shut down Yahoo! bookmarks next year. The Delicious team has been working a lot on socializing Delicious with Twitter and Facebook. They recently introduced the ability link your Delicious account to your Yahoo! account in order to have a one sign in process.
Therefore we can safely say that the old new Yahoo! Bookmarks will be let go in the coming months. Now I would love to see them doing a smart move and, instead of just migrating Y!Bookmarks users over to Delicious, offer them a Yahoo-branded stylesheet by default. It’s a move I believe they should have done with all their acquisitions in order to simply integrate a third party product in the network with an optional CSS file to satisfy both Yahoo users and those who are reluctant to see the service linked to the Yahoo network. 2 CSS, 2 sign in methods, one databasis. Can it be so hard to implement? I dont think so honestly.
This week Yahoo! rolled out a new login process for Delicious, allowing users to merge their existing Delicious credentials with their Yahoo ID. The process is pretty well done has it enables you to keep your Delicious vanity URL and be logged in whenever you are identified on the Yahoo! network. I’d say… about time!
In the past Yahoo! got rid of MyWeb and invited users to migrate to a brand new Yahoo! Bookmarks; i wonder if Yahoo! will not invite those users to migrate again to Delicious in order to centralize all those URL in one place and to streamline even more the teams in Sunnyvale. That would make sense.
