Delicious Has New Owners: YouTube Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen

When the news was leaked last fall that Yahoo was planning on “sunsetting” the bookmarking service Delicious, you could hear the hearts of a million geeks breaking. As ReadWriteWeb co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote in a lovely requiem to the site, “R.I.P. Delicious. You Were So Beautiful To Me.”

For its part, Yahoo later clarified that “sunsetting” didn’t mean “killing.” It meant selling. And today we now know who the buyers are: YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

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The two are acquiring Delicious for an undisclosed sum and founding a new company, AVOS. A blog post on the Delicious site reassures users that the transition from Yahoo to AVOS will be seamless and the service will continue. It praises Chen and Hurley noting that, “as creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.”

The transition is now underway to move Delicious data to AVOS, and according to an FAQ, the Delicious site will remain up and in its current form until July. Users will be able to opt in to transfer their bookmarks to AVOS or, as always, they can opt to download their data and select an alternative.

Details aren’t clear yet on what shape the bookmarking data will take once at AVOS, but Delicious says that that Chen and Hurley’s startup will “continue the service that users have come to know and love and by working with the community, make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s ‘tastiest’ content.”

Delicious was founded in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Hurley and Chen founded YouTube that same year, and sold it to Google eighteen months later.

According to the AVOS press statement (and note, that website is unresponsive due to what’s likely a high amount of traffic), “Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.”

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