One of the more interesting aspects of watching the action in the technology field involves examining the moves that various companies make and considering how they fit into that company's strategy. It is particularly enjoyable when you can step back and see what a company's vision of the future must be like, based on what it has done recently. Yahoo!'s purchase of Del.icio.us is a case in point.
The deal closed early in December 2005, and financial terms were not disclosed. Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter wrote in his blog about his company's acquisition by Yahoo! with quite a bit of excitement (using the word "excited" twice in the first paragraph, in fact). This is only to be expected, of course. To understand the significance of the purchase, though, you need to understand what Del.icio.us is, what it does, and how it serves its users.
Del.icio.us is a New York-based startup that was founded as a company in 2005. It didn't exist for very long before that. Joshua Schacter started it in 2003, according to the site, "in order to help him and his friends save and share web pages." In other words, del.icio.us is a collection of bookmarks. On a simple level, a user can keep links to all of their favorite websites in such a way that they can be accessed from any computer on the web. If you do a lot of work, especially research, on a variety of different computers, this is very handy; it's nice to be able to take your bookmarks anywhere and everywhere.
On a deeper level, though, del.icio.us is a lot more than a means of making one person's bookmarks portable for just him or her. The site also allows you to share your bookmarks with friends, family, and colleagues. You can even share your bookmarks with strangers -- people you don't know within the del.icio.us community, or people outside the community who are browsing the site. The site suggests that this is a great way to discover new things, because "Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it." So anybody browsing the del.icio.us site is benefiting not from the work of automated spiders and indexing programs, but from thousands of human minds at work (and at play). As you would expect, it puts a new slant on search.
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