Thursday, September 15, 2011

YouTube Founders Plan to Give Delicious a Face Lift - Guest Post


Although Delicious, a popular social bookmarking site, never quite caught on the way that many other “social” utilities on the web did, like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, owners of the incredibly popular video sharing site YouTube, recently bought Delicious from Yahoo!, hoping to redesign the service to attract more users.

Delicious, the brainchild of Joshua Schacter, began several years ago in 2003. It initially received $2 million dollars in funding, and became increasingly popular among technophiles who wanted to technology-related links categorized under various topics. In 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious. Delicious has quickly become one of the most popular social bookmarking websites, competing with the likes of Digg and Reddit. However, in 2010 it had been rumored after an internal leak that Yahoo! had intended on shutting down Delicious since they had not developed it much further after the acquisition. Later, Yahoo! clarified that it would

This summer, Chad Hurly and Steven Chen, founders of YouTube and owners of AVOS systems, the Internet company that spawned the now-famous video sharing site, acquired Delicious for an unspecified amount of money. The New York Times reported recently that Hurley and Chen are working toward restarting Delicious to be more user-friendly and less of a niche technology site. The Times article noted, describing upcoming changes:

“The current home page of Delicious features a simple cascade of blue links, the most recent pages bookmarked by its users, and it tends to largely be dominated technology news. But the new Delicious aims to be more of a destination, a place where users can go to see the most recent links shared around topical events, like the Texas wildfires or the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the gadget reviews and tech tips.”

Another change that Hurley and Chen envision is to give it broader audience that extends beyond its current technology-centered one. Another change was to make the site more personalized, so that the site will recognize your interests and suggest different links or “stacks” of links to you based on previous searches.

The article also noted that Hurley and Chen refuse to suggest that they are trying to compete with the likes of Facebook or Twitter. They explained that Delicious would be in a completely different category of social searching. While Google is good for quick and efficient searches, they said, Delicious is a tool that is more amenable to deep, involved searching on any given topic.

The new Delicious should launch sometime this year.

About Author

This guest post is contributed by Lauren Bailey, who regularly writes for best online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: blauren99 @gmail.com.

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