Around the world a lot of tech start-ups must be chortling into their coffees: Yahoo! is almost certainly shutting down delicious, the social bookmarking site it bought for something in the region of $15 million-$30 million in 2005.
There are no-end of pieces analysing the reasons for Yahoo’s current woes, so we won’t attempt to better them here. If you’re looking for a good one, try Charles Arthur’s stab over at The Guardian. What is worth looking at though, is exactly what Yahoo! could have done.
Back in the early days of web 2.0, when Facebook was just a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, Yahoo! managed to acquire a suite of much-talked about properties. In delicious, and flickr (where the image at the top of this post comes from), Yahoo! had the most popular bookmarking and image sharing sites around. Whilst there were, and remain, questions about how to monetise these, what they provided in data should have been worth millions, if not billions.
Because years before Google started experimenting with social search, or Facebook had inked a deal with Bing, Yahoo! had access to millions of bits of social data, in terms of the tags that people were using to describe web-pages and images. With this they could, and should, have powered the charge into social search, and stolen a march on their rivals. They didn’t, and, once they’ve shut delicious, they never will.
That’s a real shame, and now I really just hope that they don’t shut flickr too.
Image by Jeff Pearce on flickr
[…] Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington hammered away at Yahoo following the company’s layoff news and the announcement that it planned to shutter some favored technologies like bookmarking service Delicious and practically unheard of ones like its instant messaging product MyM. When outcry about Delicious ensued from users, Yahoo retreated, saying it would sell the service, not close it down. Mindshare is likely to be a little pleased at this news, as the company discusses the value of social bookmarking, which Yahoo could have and should have used to claim the mantle of social search. Read more on the Mindshare World blog. […]
Well let me put it this way, if yahoo had managed to take the data and transfer it into information that can be used for statistical and then to analyze it for study in parallel it may have done a research both qualitative and quantitative to enhance the viewership of it websites and as well to find a patterns that makes sense and being able to capture the true reason why traffic is being sent to their sites and why people are willing to share their information in such a social attitude there is no doubt that if yahoo had done such a step that they could and would have been ahead of the internet and social age that we are currently passing though during these years we live in. Again there is so much room to expand and grow since i believe this a beginning of a new era to a whole new platform of social, sharing and participating and sense of belonging and tribal unification for all end users.
Yeah, it is a shame, and I would be horrified if they did shut flickr…