Delicious to live on via new venture
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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Delicious’s millions of fans can breathe a sigh of relief. The popular social bookmarking site will live on. At the end of last year, Joanna Ptolomey reported that owners Yahoo! had put the site on its "death list" of online products.

Delicious aficionados were outraged at the news and wasted no time advising each other on alternative bookmarking sites, such as Stumbleupon and Pinboard. According to Mashable, start-ups such as SpringPad and a Google bookmark tool took advantage of the uncertainty of Delicious’ future and managed to poach several million Delicious users in the early days.

Yahoo! obviously realised that Delicious was too popular just to shut down and was valuable enough to sell to interested parties. In fact, at the beginning of April, LiveWire reported on rumours that Yahoo! was hoping to get around $2 million for the site.

Now we hear that Yahoo! has sold Delicious to the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen for an undisclosed amount. These are the same two who sold YouTube to Google for $1.76 billion, so they have some cash to spare. They also know a thing or two about sharing content on the web.

Hurley and Chen are planning to make Delicious part of their new start-up, Avos. Nothing is known about this enigmatic new internet venture, other than that the company is currently hiring a “world class team”, but the new owners have promised “the same great service and even easier and more fun ways to share, save and discover the web’s tastiest content”.

Delicious users will be pleased to hear that its new owners are planning to “develop innovative features” that will “help solve the problem of information overload”.  The top priority for Avos is to develop a bookmark extension that works with Firefox 4.0.

Journalism.co.uk’s blog reported today that users have until July to transfer their Delicious accounts to Avos. Failure to do so, will result in accounts being shut down about two months later.

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