Del.icio.us – Now Part Of Yahoo

Del.icio.us founder and Chief Executive Officer Joshua Schachter wrote in his company's official blog that it is now part of Yahoo. Jeremy pointed out that Flickr and Del.icio.us team may work together. This is definitely a big boost for Yahoo – Its yet to take off Web 2.0 would significantly benefit with the advantages that comes along with Del.icio.us. I think Yahoo may benefit a lot more by keeping del.icio.us service as standalone and keep integration with other Yahoo services as an additional option. I recently wrote that very few companies have grown as fast as it was before being acquired, post acquisiton also and still retain its identity and brand recall - Skype has admirably done that. Hopefully Yahoo shall take the cue here.
In an earlier post, this blog covered the perspective on Social search, Yahoo web2.0 & Del.icio.us wherein we saw that
- Del.icio.us enjoyed the advantage of being a non-threatening partner all along and has built a substantial userbase – Yahoo would benefit by that.
- Del probably had more latitude to create flexible win/win biz models and deals resulting in:.
- Installed base : Del.icio.us is growing rapidly and has the goodwill of the leading edge Net community.
- Not limited to existing social networks-. Del does not bother w/layering on social networks just yet.
- Not conceptually limited to search per se-Packaging My Web 2.0 as "search" is going to be somewhat confusing for general users.
The Web 2.0 companies emphasise on making end users a central part of their services and giving them the ability to contribute and participate in the creation, sharing, and management of content. These companies also tend to be big believers in open platforms that allow and foster the development of Web services that build on top of existing applications and Web sites run by third parties. The web 2.0 ecosystem shall transcend new frontiers. If this principle is adhered to Yahoo and the web community at large shall benefit significantly. Yahoo recent actions in buying Flickr &Del.icio.us would certainly go a long way in fostering web 2.0 phenomenon a lot more and we shall new startups entering, steeping up and receive lot more funding - talks/action around Web 3.0 shall also see increased focus. This also signifies an important trend - commercial vendors shall move in aggressively once scale is reached wherein the potential gets a positive rating. Technorati, may be the next to watch. Hopefully Google/Microsoft are listening.