More social engineering from Yahoo

12/10/2005 10:10:25 AM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

Yahoo! buys del.icio.us

Yahoo's courtship with the blogging world got a little deeper yesterday when they agreed to buy "social bookmarking" site del.icio.us. The terms of the deal and its financial make-up were not announced by either company, and no reliable murmurs have surfaced on the 'net so far.

The purchase makes sense. In March of this year Yahoo purchased Flickr, and coupled together, Flickr and de.licio.us are quite complimentary services. The idea behind both sites is relatively simple: allow users to share data (pictures in the case of Flickr, bookmarks in the case of de.licio.us), allow them to mark that data up with metadata, and make it all easily searchable. Del.icio.us' founder, Joshua Schachter, seemed pleased with the transaction, noting that Yahoo "gets it."

We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We're excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way - our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.

Furthermore, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny said that the company will likely work to put del.icio.us together with Yahoo's existing My Web service, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Flickr integrated there as well. Behold the birth of Y.ah.oo! M.y W.br!

Yahoo is a company hot on the trail of so-called Web 2.0 (a clever self-marketing term if there ever was one), and 2005 is wrapping up to be the Year of Community Driven Content; blogs, blogs, and more blogs, plus all of the accoutrements of the social scene, really hit big this year. Never mind that people have been doing this stuff for ages; it's all in the self-marketing, you see. That, and the fact that it's becoming more and more socially acceptable to know how to use a computer.

Del.icio.us fans will now have to wait and see