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Yahoo Inc., the world's largest Internet media site, had agreed to acquire Del.icio.us, a popular Web site that helps users share links to their favorite Web sites, the site's founder said on Friday.Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us, confirmed a posting on the New York-based start-up's site that the company had been acquired by Yahoo. A Yahoo spokeswoman confirmed that the agreement to buy Del.icio.us had closed on Friday.
Reuters Story [today.reuters.com]
[edited by: jatar_k at 11:38 pm (utc) on Dec. 9, 2005]
This acquisition really surprises me. First Flickr, and now del.icio.us. I really feel like both those sites were "cutting edge," full of techy early-adopters who are into the latest blogging trends and many of whom are developers/webmasters. Yahoo is really positioning themselves in the industry to get back some of the street-cred that Google stole.
Better to buy it.
Too bad Yahoogle let News.corp snap up MySpace.
Nevertheless, this is a good day for Yahoo.
I just don't get MySpace, sorry.
I signed up last month out of curiousity, but most of the MySpace pages I've checked out so far are so hard on the eyes - with seemingly little or no thought whatsoever to design, color harmony, or accessibility - that I guess I simply can't take the abuse on my senses, so I happily spend my time elsewhere - like here! :-)
I guess you are in your 30's ...Seriously no one older than 25 gets myspace ,but its very very popular among its target demographics in this case its the 14-25 yr olds.
pretty surprising purchased, honestly. wonder how much it went for.
Semel continues to impress me with his management of Yahoo!
pretty surprising purchased, honestly. wonder how much it went for.
I'm really glad for them and all, but there isn't anything even remotely revolutionary or unique about what it does, and it has been done a zillion times before... the only difference here is that they managed to achieve some moderate success and some large company decided to buy them. God save the future of the economy and technology if you only need some success to be considered "cutting edge"
My teenage niece uses myspace. She IM'd me last month asking how to hack past her school's firewall so she could get to myspace. I don't think anyone is hungering to get to Orkut or Yahoo 360 that badly.
My view on Google and Yahoo's entry into user generated content communities is that it has a top down quality to it that are similar to existing popular word of mouth grown services.
These popular sites with millions of users are like Google used to be, disruptive web destinations. Why duplicate when you can buy?
I just don't get MySpace, sorry.
Imagine you are a 13 year old girl. You have an expensive PC in your room and a nice digital camera. You don't have a job or a car so you spend a lot of time at home, except for homework and going to the mall (where you take pictures with your digital camera). You and your friends like to post the pictures you take on the Internet. You are too cool to hang out with your family so when you are at home you spend a lot of time locked in your room on your PC.
In this case do you think you would use myspace?
Imagine you are a 13 year old girl.
Oh, that's why I don't get myspace ;-)
How about a 45 year old man, yikes! ;-)
> In this case do you think you would use myspace?
I take it you're talking from personal experience, a daughter perhaps?
Obviously - MySpace is very popular with the younger generation(s) - I simply don't grasp why? that's all (guess "I'm over the hill" or "hills" as it were!).
In any event, I had a good laugh reading about "samy" and how he shut MySpace down not too long ago with his most ingenious hack (namb.la/popular/)
I take it you're talking from personal experience, a daughter perhaps?
A friend's daughter.
Back in 1996 I was corresponding with a 16 year old on AOL (being much closer to 16 then myself).
She told me about her trips to school each morning on her school bus--one of the hottest topics of conversation on the bus was using AOL IM's to find porn on the internet.
About the only thing that has changed since then is that computers are much faster and MySpace is way cooler than AOL...
Teens will always be teens.
And that's why marketers love them - always easy to predict. ;-)
Om Malik guesses between $10-$15M based on how much money they raised and how many users they had (about 300K).
Other rumors have speculated as much as $30-40M
The reason that valuation has been linked to user base is that delicious has no revenues. In that sense, this acquisition is a strong argument for the return of eyeball driven valuations.
As far why they're considered cutting edge (and web 2.0), I think it's because they've found a neat way to enable lots of individual selfish actions (the process of tagging and organizing your favorite web pages), and aggregate all those selfish actions in a way that provides value for the community (discovery of new web sites based on the tags assigned by other users.)
The biggest supporters of delicious would say that this process of web site and web page discovery based on thousands of aggregated human actions and categorizations is a legitimate rival for Google-like algorithmic search.
Is this just about the typical 13 year-old's needs for self-expression and self discovery? Or is there some signficance beyond that? Maybe I'm too stuck in the concrete World of functionality that I'm missing a cultural signficiance? Or is there actually notable functionality here that I'm missing?
As for del.icio.us - it doesn't seem to provide anything that furl doesn't apart from a promotion of Podcasts. Storing/sharing favourites is hardly revolutionary.
I have a firefox extension that lets me add any page to my del. bookmarks.
The tool lets you add keywords / tags - so if I was tagging this thread, I might use the keywords "web2.0, acquistions, valuations, etc.). Now this thread is organized according to those concepts, and is easily findable for quick reference.
From a discovery perspective, here's how I use it:
I go to Delicious/Popular - which is now on the front page, and i click on the tags that I'm interested in - web2.0, social, internet, etc. - this allows me to find pages that other people are tagging with the terms i'm interested in.
Unlike a search engine, the results are always fresh, and always changing... you can find some good stuff this way. It's kind of like other people are doing the searching for you...
It's kind of like other people are doing the searching for you...
Yeah, in a way it's like Google's zeitgeist in real time with all the details...
Zeitgeist is so "dumbed down" it's almost useless but it is still very popular because it taps into the culture. Search engines keep this detailed data proprietary, tag engines create value by making it public. I guess that's why it's 2.0.
Could someone please give me a quick run down of how the average user would use del.icio.us?
As a bookmarking tool;). Seriously - has your computer crapped out, or has it shut down while mozilla was open(It wipes your bookmark file clean) or been on another computer? Its definitely not for bookmarking your balance page on your online bank, but for most other links I find it extremely useful. Too bad it'll probably be spammed to death in no time - there's probably someone here who's figured it out by now:).
