Classic YouTube: these aren't Chen and Hurley. We'd just like to make it clear.Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube, have acquired the Delicious bookmarking service from Yahoo for an undisclosed price and added it to their new internet company Avos.
The announcement follows rumours in March that the service might be sold for around $1m - a huge drop in value from the $30m Yahoo paid for it in December 2005.
The duo - who sold YouTube to Google for $1.76bn in 2006, 18 months after creating it as a dating site and then discovering that video upload was popular too - say their aim is to "continue to provide the same great service users love and make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web's 'tastiest' content."
It seems though that the effects passed over in the sale did not include the password to the Delicious blog. On that, the most recent entry is dated 17 December, and asks - slightly plaintively - "What's Next for Delicious?".
At the time Yahoo had fired all the staff working on Delicious, though as the post said: "No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive."
However it looks like nobody wrote down the blog password, or got it from the departing staff. So nobody can put new posts there - nor, indeed, get rid of the spam that is gradually clogging up its comments.
Instead on Wednesday an announcement stuck on the front page of the blog - at its canonical URL blog.delicious.com - says that "Providing a seamless transition for users is incredibly important for both companies. Yahoo! will continue to operate Delicious until approximately July 2011. When the transition period is complete, your information will be moved over to Delicious' new owner."
From Wednesday, anyone logging into Delicious will be presented (as Guardian Technology has been) with a request for permission to move their information over. An FAQ on the transition it points out that after the transition date, anyone who has not agreed to shift their data over by then and has not downloaded it, or shifted to another service - such as Pinboard - will lose their bookmarks.
Hurley and Chen were chosen from a number of suitors "based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious", according to a statement by John Matheny, senior vice-president of "communications and communities" at Yahoo.
What's next for Delicious? It's hard to say. Bookmarking services in themselves aren't great sources of cash; Yahoo, which originally bought Delicious in December 2005 for an estimated $30m - equivalent to about $100 per registered user - never figured out how to turn it into the "social search" that many thought it might become.
Then again there's the possibility of looking at what people are bookmarking and turning that into a sort of "web news" service... rather like Digg or Reddit. And look how well they're doing! Or in Digg's case not doing.
A few details - what we can get - on Avos.com: domain was registered in May 1998, and changed hands apparently just on the same day as the announcement. The Wayback Machine has lots of pages from the site archived over the past ten years - but they all have the same message: "coming soon!"
And meanwhile, what about Yahoo? It did say back in December that Delicious was marked for "sunset".
Other services with the same target on their backs included Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, and Yahoo! Picks. Can anyone find those still running?
To be merged: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Sideline, FireEagle, Yahoo Events and Yahoo People Search. And Yahoo Deals and Yahoo Calendar were to be made into "features".
Yahoo, meanwhile, looks increasingly like a company that doesn't quite know where the next spurt of growth - or revenue, or profit - is going to come from. Yet Flickr looks safe, if only because it's a revenue-generating service.
Interesting question: if you bookmark all the old Delicious blog blogposts, where will they point to once the service shifts over?
Update: at least they've found the password for the Twitter @delicious account, which has been busy tweeting the acquisition.
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