Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us : Good news for blog publishers

Del.icio.us has been acquired by Yahoo. This per Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us’ founder.

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

What is del.icio.us? This at Dave Taylor’s blog from Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny.

Delicious is a service for saving and sharing bookmarks. It’s popular in the blog world because a lot of bloggers are information hounds that collect hundreds of links to interesting web sites. Delicious makes it easy to put them all in once place. Bloggers also like to publish links for their friends and readers to see, so there are a lot of tools for making that easy too.

Del.icio.us is a pretty cool tool, but ‘cool’ doesn’t always get by the early adopter stage as Om Malik posted about the sale. When you have a combination of no revenue and VC’s investing in your company, both the case for del.icio.us, an early exit strategy via a sale like this is needed.

For blog publishers, the acquisition is good news. Yahoo believes in RSS, communities and tagged content. All of these items play a factor in blog growth. Getting one of the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) behind tagging content could well mean tagging content will become part of our general Internet use in the years to come.