Exactly What Did The YouTube Founders Acquire With Delicious?

The big story today outside of the OMG white OMG iPhone OMG was the acquisition of the Delicious bookmarking site. Former owner Yahoo has sold the bookmarking service to the founders of online video sharing service YouTube and their new company AVOS. In reviewing about 20 blog/news posts about the acquisition, so far there has been no chatter about the acquisition price.

Back in December, Yahoo hinted that they would close Delicious service – a move I noted would hurt Yahoo within the developer/early adopter tech community. I also thought the best place for Delicious would be to be acquired by commenting service Disqus. I still think Disqus should consider expanding into bookmarking as it would make the service more sticky and could provide even more benefits to publishers.

This evening I received an email from Yahoo regarding the Delicious acquisition. There are a couple of interesting bits that got me wondering exactly what did YouTube founder Steve Chen and Chad Hurley purchase? I assumed when I read all of the copies of the press releases that the Delicious site would be put onto a blu-ray disc, handed off to AVOS, and then the entire service would be available as it is today but now hosted by AVOS.

It appears that the only bookmarks that will be available after the transition period is complete in July are those where a Delicious user has selected to move their bookmarks and opted-in to the new terms of service.

Here’s the portion of the email that discusses my point:

What happens if you do not transfer your bookmarks
– Delicious in its current form will be available until approximately July 2011.
– After that, you will no longer be able to use your existing Delicious account and will not have access to your existing bookmarks or account information.

Yahoo does explain why you should move your bookmarks over to AVOS which includes the ability to keep the bookmarks you have worked to save, ability to keep using Delicious today and into the future, and that the design won’t change (huh?).

So I am left wondering what percentage of current Delicious users will actually spend the time and move their bookmarks over? I have to imagine the percentage will be low for a few reasons:

• Delicious began operations in 2003 – how many users from the early days no longer even control the email account they registered with?
• How many users don’t even care about their bookmarks from so many years ago?
• How many users just don’t want to spend the time to do the move?
• How many users have no interest in keeping their bookmarks?

I fall into the last category – I was never a huge Delicious user to begin with but I am not sure I even care about what I saved. I am sure someone like RWW writer Marshall Kirkpatrick has already transferred over his bookmarks – I know he has always talked about how important the service is to his story research. But for casual users, will they even read the email Yahoo sent to me and everyone else?

I guess to some extent AVOS acquired the power of the Delicious brand and I am sure both very smart entrepreneurs knew going in that not everyone would transfer their bookmarks over to AVOS.

Perhaps this is best – AVOS begins their Delicious management with a set of very passionate, early adopters ready to help grow the service all over again.