Yahoo Sells Delicious to YouTube Founders http://bit.ly/koxlDf

Veiw full article here  http://bit.ly/koxlDf

Delicious was one of the original social bookmarking websites, a company at the forefront of the Web 2.0 revolution that swept Silicon Valley in the early part of the 21st century. But despite its continued popularity among many internet users, Delicious has seen a slide in recent years as other companies encroached on the turf that once was their domain.

Websites like Facebook and Twitter have been the biggest cause for their decline. Over the past couple of years, these social sites began to expand beyond their original purpose of connecting friends and family to each other. Increasingly, these sites have been used to more broadly connect people to information, a framework upon which people can spread news around the world almost instantaneously. Twitter has taken on this role with aplomb, becoming the new medium through which people share stories and articles.

But what has been wonderful news for Facebook and Twitter has been disastrous for Delicious and other social bookmarking websites like Digg. Yahoo bought Delicious back in 2005 for approximately $30 million when the website was on surer footing. Yahoo was hoping to expand its social graph at a time when companies like Google were eating into its market share with its superior search product.

However, Delicious did not provide the kind of advantages Yahoo thought it would when they bought the company. Indeed, by the end of 2010, things had gotten so bad that Yahoo fired most of the staff working on Delicious. After that, a leaked memo suggested that Delicious would simply be shut down, angering the millions who still used Delicious to find their favorite stories from around the web. Yahoo immediately denied those reports, suggesting that they would instead be looking for a buyer for the site.

After months of bargaining and negotiating, it appears that Yahoo finally found a buyer for Delicious, selling the site to a company named AVOS, a company created by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, co-founders of YouTube. Although the details of the purchase are still unclear, AVOS seems to have every intention of continuing to operate Delicious.

This is great news for small businesses looking to expand their marketing through social networking. Such advertising is completely free and can have an even bigger impact than traditional advertising since it appears organic. Of course, such a marketing strategy is not the easiest way to promote your brand. If you can reach that critical mass, however, it may be the most effective means imaginable of growing your business.