Delicious' death sentence commuted by YouTube founders
Preventing what would have been a shutdown of the service, Yahoo said Wednesday that it had sold popular social bookmarking site Delicious to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The two entrepreneurs are returning to tech under their new venture called AVOS, based out of San Mateo, Calif.
Yahoo acquired Delicious in 2005, looking to integrate the service's social aspects into its own web offerings. However, amid increasing competition the company overall began to struggle, and last December Yahoo undertook a major restructuring, meaning the shuttering of several acquired brands.
Delicious was one of those sites targeted to close, along with Altavista, Yahoo Picks, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, Alltheweb, and MyM. Altavista and Alltheweb are already gone, and Buzz shut down on April 21. It's likely that Delicious wasn't too far behind these other brands.
In a statement, Yahoo said that it would continue to operate the site during a transition period "for the next few months." Once that transition is complete, users' information would be transferred to AVOS' servers.
"As we have said, part of our product strategy involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation," Yahoo said in a statement. "We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders."
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although Yahoo said there was considerable interest from third parties in Delicious' assets. What Hurley and Chen have in mind for the venerable brand isn't exactly clear yet, but it is said that the duo is hiring aggressively to support it.
"We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web," Hurley said in a statement.