Just in time for a post-mortem on Carol Bartz’s tenure as CEO of Yahoo comes an interview with YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in The New York Times about their plans to revamp Delicious. Even before her abrupt cellphone ouster by a bunch of “doofuses”–her words, not ours–Ms. Bartz was criticized for her “failure to innovate” or even capitalize on innovative acquisitions like Delicious and Flickr.
So what will Delicious look like under the leadership of Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, who purchased the bookmarking service after Yahoo threatened to shutter it or sell? According to AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes, “The new Delicious sounds a lot like the old Delicious brought up-to-date,” but that’s sort of the point. The need for a service like Delicious, the forward-thinking bookmarking site that never quite caught on outside early adopter circles, is heightened by the torrent of information flowing from social sites like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and more.
“There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet,” Mr. Chen tells the Times. His plan is take Delicious mainstream with a recommendation feature based on what you share and a homepage that sounds a little like Techmeme to us, where users can browse “stacks” of images, videos, and links around a particular recent event
But it doesn’t necessarily have to be news-related. Delicious’s new owners also want to help you capitalize on the Googling of those who came before you, as Mr. Chen told the Times:
“You’re Googling around and have eight to 10 browser tabs of results, links to forums and message boards, all related to your search,” he said. The new Delicious, he said, provides “a very easy way to save those links in a collection that someone else can browse.”
Now if only someone would offer to buy Flickr. Betabeat shares the same position as Matthew Stinson, who recently tweeted, “Dear Yahoo!, before you implode, please sell Flickr to a responsible buyer. Kthxbye.”
