Tag It: Acquisition, Yahoo Acquires del.icio.us
Even developing their own MyWeb 2.0 (tag, save, share service) and the Yahoo 360 set of services, Yahoo still wants more assets in the community building, tagging, and folksonomy arena. Accordingly, we’ve learned that del.icio.us has now been acquired by Yahoo. Financial terms were not disclosed but Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us founder writes:
…we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web.
Schachter (congrats, btw) goes on to call Flickr, also part of Yahoo, the fraternal twin of del.icio.us. Twin, maybe. But first cousin might be better. There is a difference between tagging an image (some, but little descriptive (type of camera, location, etc.) data readily available vs. tagging a textual document. Of course, companies like Riya might also change the nature of image tagging. This post (near the bottom) has links to several items about the auto tagging images. Even a demo or two. Also worth noting is that about a week ago, Microsoft received a patent in this area.
From the sound of it, Zawodny was helpful in getting both sides together. More in this official Yahoo Blog Post.
So, what will Yahoo do with del.icio.us? Well, no specifics here but how about some speculation (what the blogosphere is all about) and random thoughts.
+ Merge del.icio.us into MyWeb 2.0 and call it MyWeb 3.0 or Yahool.icio.us? This would help grow the MyWeb user base that Greg Linden pointed out earlier this week appears to be small.
+ Would doing this upset the current del.icio.us user base?
+ Merge MyWeb, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Yahoo 360 into a single service. Would it make marketing easier? What about more disgruntled Flickr users?
+ Yahoo needs to remember that marketing and explaining each service to new users (the non 2% of early adopters) will be a challenge.
+ Do they want to continue developing and promoting two somewhat similar services
+ Keep del.icio.us as its own service? It’s another place to put ads.
+ Merge MyWeb with del.icio.us and place Schachter and his knowledge of social tagging as the person in charge?
+ Use MyWeb, Flickr, and del.icio.us and work to unify terms for better suggested terms when tagging?
Like we say all the time only time will tell. I could break into a paragraph about tagging, who tags, its value, etc. but it’s Friday afternoon and I’m very tired. More later.
Thanks to Steve R. for the tip.