y.ah.oo
Finally, Yahoo made its decision to acquire del.icio.us. I don’t need to post any link here do I? I’m pretty sure you can find it easily now on the internet. I just wanted to highlite several things to sum up with all the thoughts here, not emphasizing on the already available news story scattered around the net. I’m currently unwell now so please bear with me.
I think so far, Yahoo has shown its quality as a true web Wikimedia project. Then they bought Flickr, the first interactive (and taggable) online photo storing and photo sharing site. Then they bought upcoming.org. The last of their shopping spree it seems to be del.icio.us. There are some similiarities on those acquisition.
They are all web 2.0
For me, web 2.0 means more interactivity and more collaborations between humans with web as the medium. With Wikimedia, Upcoming, and delicious, that thing are bound to happen because they bought interaction to the next level with folksonomy and the tagging system.
They don’t have a strong income stream
This might be a little bit untrue for Flickr because they already have a premium Flickr account before Yahoo bought them (CMIIW), but for the rest of the pack, this is so true. Upcoming and delicious doesn’t have a sound business model. True they are both highly innovative on their fields, but financially speaking, they do not have a strong growth strategy.
They are small in scales
Another exception for delicious because they are gaining momentum with Flock (which gained momentum from its base program, Firefox), the other site are just unknown to regular internet users. Back before Flickr was bought by Yahoo, many unsavvy internet user are using other photo sharing site. Back then, when you ask people about Upcoming, most likely their answer will be, “Huh?â€
So in the end, is this acquisition a good thing for Yahoo or not? On one side, it is because with the acquisition, Yahoo has the brightest mind on the web on a very specialized field, customer interactivity. They also have the technical tools to rule the web. Now almost everyone is using Flickr for their photo sharing activities and using delicious bookmark to replace their traditional browser bookmark.
But on the other side, financially and strategically speaking, Yahoo still have more homework to do. I’m not a strong supporter of advertising as a growth strategy and this made no exception. It is very unwise to clutter a clean design of delicious with annoying ads and so forth. Yahoo needs to find a way to monetize these new tools in order to make it as a competitive advantage against Google.
Can Yahoo really does that? Only time will tell.
