Delicious Takeover
The long awaited Delicious takeover has been confirmed with the news that Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of Youtube, have purchased it from Yahoo. Delicious, a pioneering social bookmarking site, was acquired in 2005 by Yahoo but since late 2010 Yahoo have been looking to sell Delicious or even close it down if no buyer came forward.
Now Mr Hurley and Mr Chen have acquired Delicious with the apparent intention of using it as a key part of their next net venture called Avos. Details about how Avos will operate are scarce but following Delicious takeover Chad Hurley said the company will aim to help people manage the information gushing from the web services they use, with Mr Hurley quoted as saying “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web”.
Before YouTube, Hurley and Chen were early employees at PayPal, a leading online payment service that is now part of eBay. The partnership sold YouTube to Google in 2006 for $1.76bn (£1.06bn). Steve Chen left YouTube in 2008 and Mr Hurley left Google in late 2010.
If you have a Delicious account you can continue to use it but you must agree to let Yahoo transfer your bookmarks to the new parent company, Avos. There will be a transition period to allow time for this to take effect. Agreement to this transfer is essential for users to continue with uninterrupted use of Delicious, including keeping your Delicious account and all your bookmarks. Delicious in its current form will be available until approximately July 2011. After that, if you do not agree to the transfer, you will no longer be able to use your existing Delicious account and will not have access to your existing bookmarks or account information. Users should have an email from Yahoo in their inbox which will enable the transfer to take effect with a few clicks.
The intention of Avos is to help people cope with information overload by using tools intended to help people get to grips with the vast amount of information generated by web sites and services.
Delicious is important from an SEO perspective as links from Delicious are considered to be one of the over 200 signals used by Google to rank websites. Delicious has always been free to use but only time will tell if Delicious will recover some of its old glory following this takeover. The Hurley – Chen partnership certainly comes with a heavyweight track record and they will not have acquired Delicious without having some big plans for it’s future.
Filed in: Home Page
About the Author (Author Profile)
Patrick Clarke - 21st Century Business Entrepreneur (Social Media Business Professional, Online & offline business owner & founder). If you are a business owner or professional person looking to grow your business and get more sales or clients, or expand your network of connections, then I can help you. If you need help with your LinkedIn profile, have a "dead" Facebook Fan Page, need professional blogging articles or don't know how to use Google+ for your Local SEO Marketing, then get in touch. I would be pleased to assist. The results might astonish you!Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Many thanks for the exceptionally revealing write-up, most of us could use much more blogs such as this on the web. Could you elaborate more about the 2nd paragraph please? I am a small bit confused as well as undecided whether or not I am aware your point totally. Thanks a lot.