Yahoo! buys del.icio.us; response mixed
Yes, it’s true. Popular online bookmarking site del.icio.us has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo!.
I could spend the rest of this entry either:
- congratulating del.icio.us creators on the sale
- trying to make sense of flickr, Konfabulator, Upcoming.org, and del.icio.us being owned by the same parent company
- lamenting the sale to a corporate giant
But I’m not going to do either. Instead, I’m going to point you (and by you I mean Yahoo! management overseeing this acquisition) right back to the del.icio.us community for a reaction to this news:
http://del.icio.us/url/7070033cc303796c9e8743bbb30c23cd - This is the list of del.icio.us users who bookmarked the news announcement, many of them leaving comments on the sale.
http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/yahoo.html - The del.icio.us blog entry announcing the acquisition.
A quick glance at both these sources show mixed reactions. Many are congratulatory, while many are also fearful and pessimistic.
The recurring fears for the negative ones are:
- Yahoo + del.icio.us = ads, marketing & web 1.0-type junk
- the merger will likely require joining del.icio.us user ids w/spam-ridden Yahoo IDs
- no more open-source API, no more killer 3rd party apps
- expect it to become more “Yahooish” in appearance
If Yahoo! is smart, they’ll listen to their customer’s fears and be cautious about alienating “customers” with sweeping changes. (The term customers is of course used loosely. Del.icio.us has always been a free service, with an unclear profitability model).
Here’s some related food for thought: It would seem that we are now entering a bit of a Web 2.0 bubble, what with all the tech-related acquisitions… Perhaps the proliferation of ajax, integration-centric technologies like RSS, blogging, tagging, open source, and web standards will lead to another dotcom bubble & burst? Does the long-term future of the internet look like a cyclical series of period of successful dotcoms followed by periods of inactivity, with technological innovation steering the whole process?
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