YouTube founders buy Delicious bookmarking service from Yahoo
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Reporting from San Francisco — YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have bought the popular social bookmarking service Delicious from Yahoo Inc.
Yahoo, trying to mount a comeback under Chief Executive Carol Bartz, unloaded Delicious as part of its plan to shed underperforming business units.
It did not disclose terms of the deal.
Delicious will become part of a new venture that Hurley and Chen have launched called AVOS.
Hurley and Chen have based Delicious in San Mateo, Calif., blocks away from where they started YouTube. They say they plan to aggressively hire to improve the service for its millions of users.
Delicious, founded in 2003 and bought by Yahoo in 2005, lets users save and share Web pages. It has stumbled as more people turn to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to find news and other content.
But Hurley and Chen said they think they can make the service relevant while solving the problem of users becoming overloaded by the information that bombards them.
“We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web,” Hurley said in a statement.
Speculation about the fate of Delicious had swirled since word leaked in December that it was on Yahoo’s chopping block.
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