Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us
Yahoo, who recently purchased one of web 2.0 vanguard, Flickr, has followed up with the acquisition of del.icio.us. The acquisition was announced with a post on the del.icio.us site by found, Joshua Schachter. Overall, most of the comments are congratulatory to Joshua and his team. Some comments commend Yahoo for really "getting" web 2.0 and tagging.
However, there are some cautious comments out there as well. Eric Goldstein, co-founder of Clipmarks writes,
“…what i’m more disappointed in is how celebrated the announcement is within the “Web 2.0″community. I guess it kind of saddens me that the annointed leader of the web 2.0 movement has sold out this early in its life. sure, they made some good money and that’s cool…can’t blame them. but doesn’t this kind of serve as a reality check to new companies that even the leaders are just in it to flip it?”
Personally, I'm happy for the folks at del.icio.us. The speculation is that Yahoo paid between $15m-$25m, which should make for a happy bunch of folks when you only have 9 employees. There are additional folks on the scene, like digg.com and tailrank.com that are poking around in the social-community bookmarking space. Although I think of digg.com and tailrank.com as slightly different animals.
Yahoo certainly has the capital to spend, but I wonder if this is some indication that MyWeb and Yahoo 360 weren't taking off as expected, and Yahoo figured they could grab a ton of share/users along with some talent with these acquisitions.
