Who Will Buy Delicious From Yahoo?

December 17, 2010 by Darnell Clayton

After causing a brief firestorm amongst the blogosphere, Yahoo! is claiming that they never intended to shut down Delicious and were instead attempting to sell it off to another company.

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

– We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can. (Official Delicious Blog)

Note: As of this writing their blog is down, although fortunately for us there is a Google cache available.

Although Delicious was a force of its own years ago (perhaps second only to Digg at the time), it has declined in prominence recently as many users have moved on towards other book marking services like Evernote and Instapaper.

While the domain itself is valuable (especially if one wants to start a food blog), it’s unclear who would want to own Delicious, especially after the service became stagnate under Yahoo!’s watch.

Hopefully Yahoo! is able to find a buyer (especially one with talented engineers to keep it going) as shutting down Delicious would be a tragedy for many users still using the service.

(Hat Tip: TechCrunch)

Facebook Overtakes Google But It’s A Close, Interesting Race

September 10, 2010 by James Johnson

Facebook has officially become the number one online destination among American’s according to a report released this week by web analytics monitoring firm comScore.

According to the report, Facebook users spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook in August, while Google logged 39.8 million minutes. Yahoo came in third place, with a still decent 37.7 million minutes spent on site.

Google on the other hand can rest relieved, knowing they passed the 1 billion global users mark in that same month, making them the most popular search destination in the world.

Breaking down “time spent on-site” numbers, Informationweek says:

“Americans spent about 9.9% of their online time visiting Facebook, comScore said, vs. 9.6% of time on Google’s sites, including Gmail, Google search and YouTube. Web surfers in the United States spent approximately 9.1% of their Internet time visiting Yahoo properties”

It should however be noted that their is room for a margin of error considering comScore monitors just 2 million worldwide users and each websites’ servers to reach their number, however comScore is typically a trusted source for such statistcs.

The Facebook uptick in time spent on site comes just a few months (July) after they passed Yahoo as the number 2 destination. [Read more…]

Foursquare Talking With Top Search Engines [Report]

July 19, 2010 by James Johnson

It’s confirmed, Foursquare is currently in talks with the nets top search engines, including Google Microsoft and Yahoo.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has told the Telegraph:

“Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search,” while adding, “We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.” [Read more…]