14 DAY TRIAL // Delicious' fate is now finally known, the service which Yahoo has been trying to sell for the past months has been scooped up by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and will become part of their new company Avos which is labeled as a "new internet company."
"Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world," Delicious announced.
Delicious will be transitioned by July. The plan is not only to continue support and maintain the service, but also expand it further.
While some of the initial changes may be simple tweaks and enhancements, it does seem like the two are looking to turn the site into something much bigger.
"We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level," Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS, said. "We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web."
Delicious has seen a revival of sorts in recent years and continues to be quite popular with its loyal users. While it's one of the first Web 2.0 services, it managed to stick around, largely unchanged, and survived almost six years under Yahoo.
The site's biggest asset, apart from its large number of users, is all the bookmarking data that has been amassed. While some of it may have become less relevant over the years, there's still quite a lot of data that can be valuable in the right hands.
But it goes beyond the data, the cofounders of YouTube aren't in the business of salvaging aging sites for scraps, they certainly don't need the money and they're most likely looking for a bigger challenge. They say they want to tackle the information overload.
"We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type," Steve Chen said.
Content discovery, which is Delicious' core strength, is still one of the big promising markets online and, while there are plenty of sites doing something about it, Facebook is the best example, there is plenty of untapped potential.