Tim Mayer must have been laughing his nuts off at SES this week when we had some coffee on Wednesday morning. I told him I’d recently switched to My Web2.0 (their version of del.icio.us) but had just switched back as it had no damn firefox extension! Now I see he had something up his sleeve all along. Yahoo! have just bought del.icio.us, and not only is it of course, totally in character with their other tag based trendy purchases this last year, it’s probably the best one of the lot, bar flickr.
Congratulations to Tim and Jeremy, who I know is going to be over the moon about this one. Also, dont forget, as I did for a moment, Joshua Schachter, delicious’ founder, who’s worked his arse off on that site and Fred who had the sense to give the boy some $$$’s. They deserve every penny of the rumoured $40M+ Yahoo! paid.
So What Happens as Delicious Leaves the Geekerati and Joins the Mainstream?
Your guess is as good as mine, but short term it won’t mean much to anyone im guessing. Medium to long, I think we’ll see one of two things:
- Yahoo! destry it, and it becomes much less useful and fun
- Yahoo! make it better, more integrated with Flickr and other services and we all get more traffic (and it gets spammed to oblivion as a result of THAT).
Let’s hope it’s the latter, minus the being spammed to hell bit eh?