AVOS Aquires Yahoo's Delicious

Back in December of last year Yahoo released a statement that they would close down several of their web properties. Among them popular social bookmarking site Delicious. The statement turned out to not be entirely true, as Yahoo later reassured Delicious' users that they would keep the service running.

Yesterday now we read on the official Delicious blog that the "YouTube founders acquire Delicious". Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who have founded YouTube and sold it less than two years later to Google have acquired Delicious which will become part of their company AVOS.

A blog post on the Avos company website reveals that they have intentions to improve the site by making it "more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content". For that, they "plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload".

Delicious users who log into their account will be greeted with a "Delicious is moving to a new home" message. Users have to agree to transfer their bookmarks, account information and other data to the new company. Account data of users who do not agree to move and who do not log into their account in the migration period will become unavailable around July 2011. This screen is shown on every log in.

Users do have the option to export their bookmarks to a local computer

A FAQ has been put online that addresses several pressing questions. One of the interesting tidbits is that AVOS plans to build a Delicious extension for Firefox 4 and publish it as soon as possible.

It is likely that Delicious will lose a good chunk of its bookmarks, at least the private ones, during the transition period. First from users who once used an account but do not anymore, and from spammers who have auto-created hundreds of thousands of Delicious accounts to place links to their sites on the popular bookmarking service. It is not clear how AVOS will handle public bookmarks of users who have not agreed to move their data.

It feels logical that the company could use those bookmarks in anonymized form on the new Delicious, considering that they have been public all the time.

It seems as if AVOS has every intention to improve Delicious, and it will be interesting to read more about the company's plans and see them in action on the site.

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