I was thinking a little bit about the Yahoo/Google/Microsoft battles this morning. Sure, I almost always uses Google for search, but then it dawned on me that there is a Yahoo site that I use on a regular basis (if not daily, darn close to it), del.icio.us. It is far and away the Yahoo service that I use the most. Coming in second would have to be Flickr, but that is a pretty distant second.
It has been almost two years since Yahoo purchased del.icio.us. And more than a year since I’ve seen any talk about how much traffic they get. It would be nice to get an anniversary update.
If you do a search on Del.icio.us you’ll see that they are now displaying ads along the right hand side of the page. Here is an example using the search term ‘javascript’. Not a big surprise really, Yahoo! has to get some return on their purchase eventually. I wonder if we’ll start seeing ads in other sections as well?
Noticed by Charlie O’Donnell.
So now Yahoo has purchased Del.icio.us. There aren’t many details in the announcement, so we’ll have to wait and see where this goes. Hopefully this goes better than the purchase of Blo.gs, which has been up and down since their buyout. The Blo.gs home page has been down for the last few days, with a note indicating that it should be back up in a few days (as of 7 Dec 2005).
Although some people were pretty ticked off with having to merge their Yahoo and Flickr accounts after Flickr was bought out, for the most part it seems to have been operating well since then. I’m sure everyone will be wondering if they same sort of account merger will happen, especially given Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 service. Will they try to merge everything into My Web 2.0?
I suspect that the growth of Del.icio.us made this move a given. Without more money and resources it would be difficult to continue operations with the type of growth they’ve seen.
Okay Yahoo, this is another change to will people over, by not screwing this up. Loyal customers aren’t made when you sell them something, they are made when you fix things that are broken.
UPDATE 12:20pm 9 Dec 2005: Yahoo also has an announcement of the purchase on their blog.
Yesterday the official del.icio.us Firefox extension was announced. I’ve installed it on Firefox 1.5 on Mac OS X and it is awesome. The various tagging options is great, especially being able to highlight text and use that as the expanded description. You can search your del.icio.us bookmarks directly from the Firefox search field. I’ve only noticed one big thing that is missing so far: bookmark backup and/or syncing. The other Firefox plugins for syncing and/or backuping up your del.icio.us bookmarks aren’t that great, so I’d hoped that this extension would have filled in that problem space also. Except for that omission this extension is a must for any del.icio.us user in my book.
I’m not sure why it took so long for this come out, but this I’m thrilled that it is finally here.
Just in case you missed it you can find a steady stream of bookmarked websites on my Links page. This page is powered by the RSS feed of my Del.icio.us account: del.icio.us/josephscott.