Yahoo Lord of the Bookmarks

It's always thrilling to be validated as an early adopter. Well Yahoo has done that by acquiring del.icio.us. I've been using del.icio.us since early 2004 (del.icio.us therefore has made a killing in 2 years of existence!). When I began using it, I didn't even bother to tag my entries. I used it more for my multi-browser, multi-machine coordination problem. However over time I built up some kind of discipline, then when the auto-tagging feature came online it became even less painful. Still it was difficult to do search as compared to other application like furl.

The benefit of course of a rapidly growing user base (metcalf's law) compensated for its technical weaknesses. I am indeed surprised that Google didn't acquire it instead. Google keeps getting beat to the punch in aquiring users (see: The logic behind "Ebay acquiring Skype" ). A page-rank algorithm based on users indicating their interest by bookmark has a lot of potential (disclaimer: I own YHOO stock).

In terms of up time del.icio.us has not really been impressive. Well what can one expect from such a little company? In addition, its search capabilites have been minimal at best. Now with Yahoo in the picture, I do expect more consistent responsiveness and an even better way to navigate the web!

Incidentally, I was a bit enterprising when del.icio.us came into the scene. Del.icio.us had a very innovative naming of a url. So I acquired several interesting domains in similar vein: ageo.us, igio.us and urio.us. These can be used to spell out words like outr.ageo.us, rel.igio.us and c.urio.us. The first one is the most interesting, since the trend is to name sites that end with an 'R'. So for example flickr becomes flickr.ageo.us. Let me know if you're interested in anyone of them.