Social Media Consolidation Act 8: Yahoo takes out del.icio.us

First, I apologize for my complete silence over the past week or so, but I have been completely swamped by a number of things - that I can't talk about yet, and I have just returned from Paris where I spoke at the excellent Les Blogs 2.0 organized by my buddy Loic.

As I am kicking back in gear this morning, I just got two parallel IMs from Om Malik and Mike Arrington about the sale of Del.icio.us to Yahoo. The much expected consolidation of the Web 2.0 space is continuing after taking a quick break (the last acts were the acquisitions of Upcoming.org and NetNewswire a couple of months ago). There are already plenty of comments, including posts from founder Joshua Schachter, acquirer Jeremy Zawodny and backer Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures (lead VC in the company's Series A round 8 months ago).

Joshua wrote:

We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We're excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way - our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.

I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!

The number one question everybody is asking is “HOW MUCH” ?

Del.icio.us/Joshua were one of the early movers in the whole tagging/folksonomy movement, and inspired the now widespread use of that concept in almost every Web 2.0 application that involves personal bookmarking or categorization. So I hope that he did well out of this deal, and will have the opportunity to work with a bunch of very clever people on MyWeb and the “socialization” of Yahoo web properties.

I mentioned social bookmarking as one of the areas I saw a “bubblet” on the rise in my panel on “Investing 2.0” in Paris, with 10+ (if not 20+) companies developing very similar functionality to delicious - which had the first mover advantage but a reasonably limited barrier to entry. Since the business model had not yet been deployed, and there was a lot of people rushing into the space backed by $$$, the company might have made the decision to play the safe side in selling early and make some money (low single digit multiple - though I have no insider information ?) as opposed to raising additional capital - provided they had such an opportunity - and play the longer term. It is the same concern that led my decision to get involved in a bookmarking play of a different nature, with a clearer focus and monetization, Kaboodle.

It also sounds like Jeremy Zawodny has a lot of influence on Yahoo's M&A strategy: he openly wrote on his popular blog about liking Flickr. Ding! So did he on Del.icio.us. Re-ding! So Jeremy, what else do you like these days :-) ?

Comments

[Jeremy Zawodny]

Heh. Maybe I'm an early indicator of future acquisitions.

Or maybe it's all a ruse so that I can distract the public when the Really Big One comes along. :-)