Revamped Delicious to Launch Within The Year

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What do you do after buying a once-popular web service that has been on the decline? Well, revamp it, of course! This is just what YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen plan to do with Delicious, which they acquired from Yahoo! earlier this year.

Delicious — formerly del.icio.us — had been at the forefront of the web 2.0 revolution when it popularized the use of tagging to organize content, and social bookmarking for sharing links. The service has since remained as simple as when it first launched, even as it had been acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. But Yahoo! planned to “sunset” the service in late 2010, along with other weak-performing brands that were up for retirement.

Former YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen had just formed VC firm Avos and were on the lookout for projects and brands to support. News of Yahoo!’s ditching Delicious was just what they needed to hear. No details were shared as to the acquisition cost of Delicious, but these guys are sure to have some money, having sold YouTube to Google for $1.6 billion in 2005. But what they plan to do with Delicious had been a mystery until now.

In an interview with the New York Times, Hurley and Chen say they are in the process of revamping Delicious. While the service is not as popular as it used to, the brand still has some pull among loyal users. Given the information overload resulting from the multiple information streams we get — Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Google searches, email and the like — Avos wants to redesign Delicious such that it will make it easier to access the content you want based on interest, past bookmarking activity, and online social connections.

We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing … [The new Delicious provides] a very easy way to save those links in a collection that someone else can browse.

Analysts say this might be a precedent for establishing social search — something that Google has been cooking up for some time now, particularly with its launch of Google+. Delicious didn’t quite capture a mainstream audience back when it first started. But with people looking for better ways to manage the information overload, Avos’ idea to revamp the service might just be what we need to minimize the confusion from all data and information sources.

Hurley and Chen say they plan to release the revamped Delicious before the year ends. Early delicious users will be invited to be part of an initial set of beta tests to gauge the desirability of the resulting product.