Yahoo.licio.us
by Stuart Robertson on December 9th, 2005 | tools
Surprising news today—apparently del.icio.us has been aquired by Yahoo! in the same manner that Flickr was. It seems Yahoo! is leaving search algorithms to Google and focusing on the power of social bookmarks and tagging, also know as folksonomies. Both Flickr and del.icio.us became successful because of the way they let people tag content and search for new content based on tags, or browse through the bookmarks or photos of people with similar interests. When you look at the ways del.icio.us and Flickr are similar, this acquisition makes a lot of business sense.
Since publishing the Best Webcomics of 2005 post, I’ve been telling a lot of people about del.icio.us and encouraging them to start using it to bookmark their sites. Just this morning I added a plugin to the blog to make it easy to bookmark entries.
I’m not always happy to see larger companies continually aquire smaller innovative companies, but Flickr has remained a great service since being acquired—and so has Konfabulator for that matter. Let’s hope we see improvements to the service (the UI could do with some work) and it remains as open and flexible as it is now.
Stuart Robertson
