YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have been in news of late for their interests in buying Delicious, a social bookmarking service created in 2003 by Yahoo. Both Hurley and Chen have shown their capabilities in turning websites into Internet gold. With their YouTube sellout, they did prove their worth as Google had paid them a whooping $1.65 billion.
Their next project, Delicious, might sound interesting as they had planned many innovations for it when it purchased Delicious in April this year. They had noted that their aim is to revive Delicious in a way that it gains popularity among the technocratic, as the main disadvantage Delicious had was that it failed to catch on with a broader audience. Hurley recently said that their plans in brief was to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world.
Delicious has had its history, having a mix of popularity which was shunned by Yahoo itself. For its background, Delicious allows people to save links from around the Web and organize them using a simple tagging system. One can assign keywords like “neuroscience” or “recipes.” This service has praises from many for the way it allowed easy sharing of those topical links. Efforts from Yahoo were made till 2005, after which it seemed like Yahoo dumped Delicious for its other priorities.
December 2010 saw leaked internal reports from Yahoo hinting that the company had plans to sell off or shut down Delicious. Chen and Hurley at the same time had formed a new company called Avos. Planning about their next venture, but their focus seemed to have been on keeping from the normal drowning pattern in the flood of news, cool new sites and videos, which have been surging through their Twitter accounts and RSS feeds. Chen said, “Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day. There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on.” Delicious sell out news tang a few bells in Chen and Hurley’s minds and there was an offer made from their side to Yahoo, for which the financial details were not disclosed.
The new Delicious owners said that the revamping of the service would have clear resemblance to the original Delicious when it opens to the public, but it was noted from their blueprint that one might see an overhaul of the site’s design, as well as the software and systems used to tag and organize links.
Hurley said that they wanted to visually simplify things, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing. There was further explanation from Chen which came up in form of an example. He said, “You’re Googling around and have eight to 10 browser tabs of results, links to forums and message boards, all related to your search”. He continued saying that the revamped Delicious would provide an easier way to save the links in a collection, which can be now browsed by someone else too.
According to comScore, Delicious still has around half a million visitors on a monthly basis. This might be the point, the new Delicious owners might be aiming at mainly as starting up a new service would be difficult to get visitors.
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