16
December
2010
|
17:26 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Reports That Yahoo Will Shutter Curation Service Delicious As Curation Gets Hot...

Alexia Tsotsis at Techcrunch and Liz Gannes at AllThingsD are reporting that Yahoo is shutting down several services:

Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out . . . that Yahoo! is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others.

And:

Products on a list to be shut down include MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious. Some of those properties came from acquisitions and others were internally generated.

It's sad that a service such as Delicious, which was one of the early success stories of Web 2.0 is likely being closed.

Delicious provides a bookmarking service that allows people to organize web sites and tag them with specific labels. Others can then use those tags to find web sites.

Delicious and Flickr were two of the poster children of the first flush of Web 2.0 services; their acquisitions by Yahoo in 2005 were among the first signs of an upturn in tech markets following a long recession.

The deals motivated many entrepreneurs to build many new startups focused on the emerging Web 2.0 market.

Doubly sad is that Delicious is a curation service and curation is becoming a very hot topic and one that will dominate much of the discussions about the web in 2011. Many people use and rely on Delicious bookmarks and it's not clear if or how the service will survive.

AllThingsD received the following response from Yahoo regarding Delicious:

"We continue to operate Delicious today, and will communicate specific details when appropriate."