Cheers for Yahoo's move to a community-driven Web

Bloggers are celebrating today's news that Yahoo has agreed to buy online bookmark and tagging site Delicious. With only nine employees, Delicious has gained a huge following in recent years. Its system of tagging and bookmarking has become a key part of many blogs and boasts some great industry thinkers as fans.

The purchase doesn't come as much of a surprise to most, given the growing interest in social networking sites and technologies based around community involvement. And Yahoo isn't being left behind in the trend. In March, the search giant announced it would purchase the wildly popular photo-sharing site Flickr. But what likely piqued Yahoo's interest in Flickr wasn't simply photo sharing or pageviews, but rather its system of cataloging images uploaded by users. It's a system of tagging that is becoming much more popular among groups of avid Web users and is part of a larger movement toward community-driven content creation and discovery. Sites like Digg.com, Wikipedia and Slashdot show how successful a community-based model can be. As the Web has become inundated with scams, misinformation and sites laden with pop-up ads, navigating to trusted, high-quality Web pages has become invaluable, and Web aficionados are increasingly relying on each other to make that easier.

The fact that a huge online presence such as Yahoo is paying attention to this trend and is presumably planning to integrate such technology into its own offerings is promising. Many bloggers are hopeful that a combination of Yahoo Groups, Flickr, Yahoo360 and Delicious could result into a beautiful user experience. But not everyone celebrated the buy. More than a few bloggers lamented the fact that one more small, innovative company is being swallowed up by one of the big guys and are just hoping the good ideas coming from Delicious don't disappear.

Blog community response:

"I think it's a great deal for both parties. It's completely in tune with Yahoo's DNA and developing FUSE philosophy and obviously a great deal for the people behind delicious, including Union Square Ventures who invested when many of us were scratching our heads looking for the business model."
--Morrison

"The addition of Flickr, Yahoo360, the new RSS element of the beta e-mail product. Adding del.icio.us is a perfect fit...The pieces are there. The thread to hold it together is what I'm looking for next. Will Yahoo do it? Will Google, who is similarly positioning products, do it? Microsoft?"
--Full Circle Online Interaction Blog

"Yey, now my personal linkfarm will be analysed in order to make money with social network engineering. And I canÂ’t even export my bookmarks to avoid an google/yahoo/generic-other-global-we-track-all-of-your-community-steps-actor service. shit!...Is there any room in the future for small businesses in any industry?"
--Blip Blog