Yahoo acquires shared bookmark site Del.icio.us

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo, the world's largest internet media site, had agreed to acquire Del.icio.us, a popular website that helps users share links to their favourite websites, the site's founder said on Friday.

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 spokeswoman confirmed that the agreement to buy Del.icio.us had closed on Friday.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

"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 (http://del.icio.us/) provides a simple way for hundreds of thousands of web users to share and categorise their favorite web page bookmarks as web pages.

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

The acquisition of Del.icio.us marks the second major acquisition by Yahoo of a leading "social networking" site. Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo acquired popular photo sharing site Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) 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 favourite links to websites, Schachter said.

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 (http://www.memepool.com/), a kind of daily diary of links to interesting websites that has been running since 1998.

Schachter plans to move to Sunnyvale to join Yahoo's search products group, the same division where Flickr is based.

"Just like we've done with Flickr, we plan to give del.icio.us the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community," Jeremy Zawodny, an engineer in Yahoo's search group, said on a Yahoo company blog. (http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000223.html)

Del.icio.us joins a growing stable of properties where Yahoo seeks to encourage hundreds of millions of its users worldwide to rely on the opinions of others — their writings, photos, videos and web links — to search the web.

The company is working to integrate a range of different user-contribution functions across the Yahoo.com network, from Yahoo news to travel to search.

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