Youtube Founders in for a Delicious treat?

Posted: 03 May 2011 03:08 PM PDT

Like other Delicious (bookmarking site) users, I also received an email on the 27th of April mentioning its acquisition by Youtube founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Yes, these were the two geniuses, along with Jawed Karim, who founded the most popular video sharing website in the world. Following the acquisition of Youtube by Google in 2006, I haven’t really heard of anything from these guys.

What is undoubtedly true of these pioneers is that they certainly know how to build a community. Youtube isn’t even a proper social network, it is just a platform where you can ‘Broadcast yourself’. But these two men have built it into this internet giant that it is today. Youtube, at one time, had the most interactive community on the internet.

Yahoo! made a statement last year about its intention of discontinuation of delicious from its social media ‘arsenal’. With the deal being closed after 5 months, it seems that either they had a tough time finding a buyer or they really were concerned on handing it over to a company that could “make more sense of the service”.

Whichever the case, according to speculations and rumors, the deal was closed around the $5 million mark. Educated guesses were that Yahoo! acquired Delicious in 2005 for somewhere between $15 million and $30 million. Now, it would be unfair to make judgements on the Yahoo! product management based on rumors about the purchasing and selling price, so I would leave that part to a side for now.

Although Yahoo! claimed that Delicious would make more sense with someone else, one might think that why Yahoo! failed to make sense of it. The fact that it bought Delicious for a double digit million dollar figure and sold it, most probably, at a loss is a more-than-clear indicator of its failure to achieve its acquisition goals. Obviously, it wasn’t making much money either.

Delicious might’ve been a much bigger and more useful tool had it grown to the masses properly. It had (and still has) the one feature Google lacks: Direct user input. Delicious maintained a user community where people shared and bookmarked links on the internet that they found interesting. With that edge, many anticipated Delicious to become the next big thing after Yahoo! acquired it. Too bad things didn’t work out the way they were meant too.

As a delicious user and fan, I’m super excited with this acquisition because these two social media pioneers may just add the well-needed push to delicious to take it to the next level. After all, the internet is now evolving into web 3.0. Will these people be able to establish a system to improve delicious and bring it to the top 50 internet giants or will the efforts go down the drain? Only time will tell the real answer to this, but for now you can use the comment section below to explain your thoughts on this acquisition.