Yahoo! Sees Del.icio.us Future - Yahoo! and Web 2.0

Yahoo! has a good track record with other acquisitions it has made, such as the paid search network Overture and the web mail provider Oddpost. This is also not the first purchase for Yahoo! where community has played a major factor in the acquired company's value. Earlier in 2005, the search engine purchased Flickr, a photo-sharing site that Schachter referred to as del.icio.us' "fraternal twin."

Yahoo! has shown signs, in other words, that it understands the concept of social bookmarking. One person who has used the del.icio.us service for six months believes the purchase will lead to easier searching, a higher probability of finding similar users and relevant websites, and lots of the kinds of features that only Yahoo! Labs can dream up. But the purchase has significant meaning beyond the changes, good or bad, that it will bring to the del.icio.us community.

Both Flickr and del.icio.us represent the kinds of companies that are described as being part of Web 2.0. Despite arising after the dot-com collapse, Web 2.0 companies share something with one of the best known pre-collapse dot-com success stories, namely eBay. As with the auction giant, Web 2.0 companies are supported by their communities; their users are central to their services, and often create, share, and manage content. In addition to Flickr and del.icio.us, Wikipedia can be considered part of Web 2.0, as can blog search provider Technorati.

These kinds of companies, which harness the power of literally hundreds of thousands of minds, may well be the future of the web, and Yahoo! seems ready to gradually remake itself to take advantage of that trend. This could help it pull ahead of Google. On the other hand, the move is not without its risks. Wikipedia, for example, despite the many volunteer editors who scour its pages and the supposed speed with which erroneous information can be corrected in its articles, has recently been the target of serious scandals over inaccurate and blatantly wrong information in its entries.

If search engines begin to take these communities seriously, and use them as a significant part of their algorithms, the whole nature of SEO could be changed. Instead of optimizing to please the spiders, website owners will need to optimize to please the users and convince them that the site is worth bookmarking. Hmm. On second thought, perhaps that isn't quite so different from what site owners and SEOs are trying to do now after all. It will simply make it more explicit that websites exist to serve their visitors -- and sites that do not will find themselves more strongly penalized than before.