Users of the web-based social bookmarking site Delicious are being asked to transfer their accounts to AVOS, the social bookmarking and sharing platform’s new owners – the founders of YouTube.
Users who do not to transfer to the new service will be able to access their accounts for approximately two months, after which time they will be closed.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who set up YouTube and sold it to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, said their “first hand expertise enabling millions of consumers to share their experiences with the world” will be used in developing Delicious.
“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” Hurley said in a press release. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”
In December, Yahoo stated Delicious “was not a strategic fit” within the company and then announced it was seeking a buyer.
The sale to AVOS was announced yesterday for an undisclosed sum.
What is Delicious and why is it useful to journalists?
When it appeared that Delicious was to be shut down, Paul Bradshaw wrote an article on his Online Journalism Blog of its importance to journalists.
I am hugely sad about [the closure] – Delicious is possibly the most useful tool I use as a journalist, academic and writer.
Not just because of the way it makes it possible for me to share, store and retrieve information very easily – but because of the network of other users doing just the same whose overlapping fields of information I can share.
Delicious is a social bookmarking service for saving, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
It was started in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005.
Instead of having different bookmarks saved on every computer, Delicious allows you to save and tag news articles or interesting sites and share with others.
The Delicious logo is often displayed on the share option of a news story.
Users build their own network to follow or have their bookmarks followed by other users.
By tagging saved bookmarks Delicious users can keep track of areas of interest.
