Yahoo! Purchases del.icio.us

The ever popular social bookingmarking site del.icio.us has been purchased by Yahoo!.

Del.icio.us allows its users to create bookmarks, however since it is web based, they follow you everywhere. That in itself isn’t what makes del.icio.us powerful though, it’s the community driven aspect of it. People bookmark a site because it is useful to them in some way, so in short del.icio.us is providing a huge shortlist of excellent bookmarks cultivated by other internet users.

The site also allows its users to categorise their bookmarks and tag them. A tag is generally a very specific category, so while you might categorise something as programming – you might tag it as JavaScript, XML, CSS, and AJAX. The user specifies the categories and tags, so they are naturally grown – not specified by the del.icio.us team. As such, the categories and tags should make more sense to more people, as its the community that is powering the growth of the categories and tags. The more people link to a particular resource in their bookmark list, it increases the popularity of that link – in essence making it important in that group or collection of tags.

The acquisition of del.icio.us is the second such purchase for Yahoo! this year, after acquiring Flickr toward the end of March 2005. Flickr is a social image sharing website, where they allow their users to categorise and tag photos. Clearly Yahoo! can see an incredible market in the community or has a use for the tagging type nature of these sites as they supposedly paid between US$30-40 million for each of them.

Congratulations to the founders of both of these sites, it just goes to show what a good idea and some leg work can get for you.

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