Sunnyvale, California — The future of social bookmarking service Delicious is no longer in danger. Delicious, whose future had been in question since Yahoo announced its intention to divest itself of it last year, will live on as part of a new Internet company run by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Delicious, whose future had been in question since Yahoo has been trying to find a way to offload the service since last year, will become part of Avos, a new company Hurley and Chen have launched.
Surprisingly, YouTube co-founders Hurley and Chen have found something to do with some of the $1.6 billion they made selling the service to Google, buying bookmarking service Delicious from Yahoo Inc. The service will now become part of Avos, a new Internet company, the duo said today in a statement. Hurley is chief executive officer of the new business.
“We are thrilled to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” he said in the statement. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web.”
The acquisition was confirmed by Delicious, which confirmed the deal via its blog. Yahoo will continue to operate the site until July, when it will handover to AVOS, which is being run by the founders of YouTube.
“Today, we are delighted to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world,” Delicious said in its blog post. “They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.”
Yahoo senior vice president of communications and communities at Yahoo, John Matheny, said that Hurley and Chen were chosen for their “passion and unique vision”.
“As we have stated, part of our product plan involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation,” Yahoo added in a blog post. “We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are building an exciting new company and we look forward to watching the Delicious service continue to develop!”
Interestingly, the popular social bookmarking site Delicious, which was established in 2003 by Joshua Schachter who is no longer involved with it, helped usher in the Web 2.0 era of online applications, along with Flickr, which Yahoo also acquired, and others. Delicious lets users save, share, tag and annotate website links, providing a next-generation, cloud-based approach to the traditional storing of bookmarks within Web browsers locally in PCs.
Nevertheless, following the deal, existing users will be asked to opt-in under the new owners, or will be able to export their data if they want to leave, and Avos has identified developing a Firefox 4 plug-in as a priority.