Yahoo gobbles up Del.icio.us

By Reuters

Published: December 9, 2005, 2:29 PM PST

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Yahoo, the world's largest Internet media site, has acquired Del.icio.us, a popular Web site that helps users share links to their favorite sites.

Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us, confirmed a posting on the New York-based start-up's site that the company had been acquired by Yahoo. A Yahoo representative confirmed that the agreement to buy Del.icio.us had closed on Friday.

Neither party disclosed financial terms.

"We are joining forces to build my vision of creating a way for people to remember things together," Schachter told Reuters in a phone interview. "It is a shared-memory site."

Del.icio.us provides a simple way for hundreds of thousands of Web users to share and categorize their favorite Web page bookmarks as Web pages.

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It is considered one of the leading examples of the "Web 2.0" phenomenon, which refers to a new generation of collaborative sites that have grown up on the Web in recent years that depend on user-contributed information.

The buyout of Del.icio.us marks the second major acquisition by Yahoo of a leading "social networking" site. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo acquired popular photo-sharing site Flickr earlier in 2005.

Del.icio.us has only nine employees. Venture backers include Union Square Capital, Amazon.com and BV Capital, among others. Some 300,000 users have shared more than 10 million of their favorite links to Web sites, Schachter said.

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As a sideline to his day job at New York investment bank Morgan Stanley, the Web developer has been responsible for creating two cult crazes on the Internet.

Schachter was co-developer of Memepool, a kind of daily diary of links to interesting Web sites that has been running since 1998.

He graduated from Carnegie Mellon with an electrical engineering degree in 1996, according to his personal site. Schachter plans to move to Sunnyvale to join Yahoo's search products group, the same division where Flickr is based.