Delicious takeover by YouTube founders

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YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired Delicious, the social bookmarking cloud service, from former owners Yahoo.

Hurley and Chen have engineered the takeover through their new company Avos, with the former saying of the deal: “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

It appears the duo want to bring their wealth of experience from running masses of user-uploaded content on YouTube to the bookmarking field and they see it as an area with great potential.

The Delicious site said the pair were “committed to running and improving Delicious going forward” and were “aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.”

They have announced plans to work closely with the user community to try and improve the service and its features, including a bookmark extension integrated with Mozilla Firefox 4.0, while Chen described a particular interest in combating ‘information overload.’

“We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” he said.

Delicious has been going since 2003 as one of the pioneering social networking and content sharing services, alongside peers such as Flickr and Digg.

The start-up distinguished itself with its unique focus on cloud-based bookmarking. Its features include many typical social networking tools and the ability to save, share, tag and add notes to website links from a central online hub, rather than on a personal web browser.

Yahoo acquired the start-up in 2005, but last year made it apparent it wanted to shed the venture as it seemed unable to adequately support the service.

Delicious said existing user data would be preserved. However, it does require users sign in to the service and agree to have the data transferred before the handover in July this year.

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