So Does That Make Them Del!icio!us!?
from the where-do-you-stick-the-r? dept
Yahoo! has been very active in buying some of the bigger buzz-generating small startups lately. It started with Flickr!, and was followed up with things like Oddpost!, Upcoming! and Konfabulator!. They've been working hard to try to spread that "Web 2.0" DNA (no, don't even try to explain what it is) throughout the company, but apparently they're still looking for injections of buzz from the outside. Today comes the news that they've picked up del.icio.us, the ultra-popular social bookmarking site. We'd heard that a bunch of the big names had kicked the tires of del.icio.us about a year ago, before the company decided to seek some VC funding instead. It was never entirely clear how the company was going to make money -- so apparently they've joined the built to flip crowd. Not that there's anything wrong with that. This type of deal probably works out well for all sides -- though, the del.icio.us users will now start to fret about how Yahoo will "ruin" the site. For the most part, though, it seems like Yahoo has been willing to let these projects continue in a reasonable way. What will be most interesting is how they integrate these offerings into the homegrown ones, like My Web, that never seemed to catch on in the way del.icio.us did on its own.
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I actually found out about del.icio.us through Yahoo Web 2.0. Yahoo's offering was pretty poor and half of the discussion on their blogs and forums centered around copying features from this other site and how to import bookmarks from there... so of course I had to go see what they were copying and found del.icio.us to be much better. I for one am glad to see them combined, although I do hope they leave the original site and functionality relatively untouched while combining the backend bookmarks and tagging to also work in Yahoo.
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Yahoo breaks stuff
Doesn't Yahoo understand that once they've absorbed something, it's no longer the thing they absorbed??
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Re: Yahoo breaks stuff
I don't see that as breaking it. I did see the Flickr cost come down though. And, to note, Konfabulator dropped from $25 per platform (IIRC) to $0 when Yahoo acquired them.
Sorry, but I see Yahoo's deep pockets as a good thing for cheap people like me.
IMHO, the real question with del.icio.us will be to see how they mix and match it with MyWeb2, which sucked at sharing (invite process/arbitrary URLs) but was decent at caching (cf. Furl) and offered excellent privacy controls (private/friends/public).
Further, IMHO, the social bookmarking is the next to be tapped big-business model. As everything becomes server side and bookmarks are tagged rather than filed, having the definitive social-bookmark sync server will probably prove to be quite profitable in the same way that Google does by being the definitive search engine.
Come to think of it, Flock is probably a taste of whatever browsers Google and Yahoo are working on.
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Re: Yahoo breaks stuff
It will get worse, too. Yahoo didn't buy Flickr because they wanted a great "service"....they bought it because they needed the market research that Flickr provides to YAHOO under the auspices of a service to users. That, and they can count on a percentage of users uploading porn to their Flickr pages so Yahoo doesn't technically have to be in the "business" of porn, but they can still get some of that valuable traffic. Going forward, expect more invasive "metrics" and "web bugs" in all of Yahoo's "services."
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Re: Yahoo breaks stuff
The Delicious buy makes a ton of sense -- Yahoo! started off as a directory, but could not scale with internal web surfers. This is a return to Yahoo's roots, and in a scaleable way (via folksonomy). And Yahoo's distribution and brand may just make Delicious interesting to the masses.
People are underestimating Yahoo!...
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