Del.icio.us aka Delicious.com is without doubt one of the most loved, if not most used, bookmarking service. The website has been around for more than half a decade as a Yahoo service. Although Delicious has not exactly helped Yahoo make money, it is nevertheless a nifty service that still has a huge captive crowd who can be monetizable in other ways.
It has hence come as a huge disappointment that Yahoo may be planning on shutting down Delicious.com. This is courtesy an internal webcast that apparently got leaked to the web by an employee. The screencast has classified several Yahoo properties under categories titled ‘Sunset‘, ‘Merge‘ and ‘Make Feature‘. Delicious – along with other websites like MyBloglog and Yahoo Buzz find themselves clubbed in the ‘Sunset’ category. It is now being speculated that Yahoo may have decided to pull the plug on Delicious – soon.
But if the words of at least one Yahoo employee are anything to go by, that may not be the case. Jeremy Hubert, a prototyper for the Yahoo! Search UED Team has noted in a tweet,
Yahoo’s own PR statement had rather clearly implied otherwise.
“We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”
So for now, let’s just hope Jeremy is right and sunset does not mean shutdown.
Despite these several services owned by the Sunnyvale based internet giant, the company has been largely seen to be banking on its content portals moving forward. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz sees her company as a bigger version of AOL, that’s it!