Yahoo! buys del.icio.us

By Steve Malone

Posted on 12 Dec 2005 at 10:38

The community bookmarking site del.icio.us has been bought by Yahoo! The site allows visitors to store their links on a single site that can then be accessed from any computer.

The bookmark management system allows users to create links to their favourite articles, blogs, music, reviews, and pretty well anything else and access them from any computer on the web. The web site also allows the bookmarks to be shared with friends, family, and business colleagues.

It also relies heavily on 'tagging', which means that it makes the content easier to index and be discovered by new visitors. Tags themselves are simply one word descriptions assigned to any bookmark.

Sounds familiar? The site is very closely related to the Flickr picture management site that was bought by Yahoo! in March of this year. The possibly synergies between the two have not escaped either Yahoo or del.icio.us. Already founder Joshua Schachter says he is ' excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!'

The del.cio.us site also fits in well with Yahoo!'s vision of creating Web-based communities of loyal visitors who not only use the Internet portals increasing range of services from instant messaging to online travel but who also revisit sites on a regular basis.

As with Flickr, the Yahoo! name and resources will allow the site to develop, and provide it with a much higher profile than the current user base of online cognoscenti, through better integration with Yahoo's search products.

Schachter created del.icio.us in 2003 to help him and his friends save and share web pages among themselves. This year, del.icio.us, Inc. was formed in order to benefit from venture capital from the likes of Amazon, Esther Dyson and Marc Andreeson to help develop the service.

The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.