Yahoo: We're not shutting down Delicious

IDG News Service - Yahoo will not shut down Delicious and instead is trying to sell it to another company. At least, that's what Yahoo wrote on the Delicious blog Friday, a day after reports circulated that it planned to shut down the social bookmarking pioneer.

"We're actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users," the blog post says. "We're in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we'll share our plans with you as soon as we can."

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For now, Delicious users don't have to rush to export their bookmarks because the service will remain active. "We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We'll let you know more as things develop," the blog post reads.

Yahoo had a chance to clarify the matter Thursday and did not, contributing to the press coverage that the Delicious team found so upsetting.

On Thursday, a Yahoo corporate slide popped up on Twitter that showed Delicious among the services Yahoo plans to shut down, prompting an outcry among its loyal fans, who use the service to store, categorize and comment on links to websites.

Asked to comment on the slide Thursday, a Yahoo spokeswoman sent a statement acknowledging that the company plans to cut what it considers "underperforming or off-strategy products" in the coming months.

She confirmed that social news site Buzz and Yahoo's Traffic APIs will be shut down, but didn't comment about other services listed on the slide as slated for closure, including Delicious and the geolocation tool Fire Eagle.

Delicious is emblematic of the Web 2.0 services that jump-started innovation on the Web after the dot-com bust, by popularizing community participation through content tagging, sharing, mashups and collaboration, along with Flickr, Wikipedia and Blogger.

Delicious was founded in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Its founder, Joshua Schachter, left Yahoo in 2008, worked at Google and is now an angel investor in technology companies.