Whoa Nelly, popular Web 2.0 web service del.icio.us has been acquired by Yahoo!.
Congratulations to another one of my favorite tools getting some support from a big dog like Yahoo!.
It’s interesting to note that they’re going to be working closely with Flickr, another Yahoo company. Also interesting to see that Yahoo already has a competing service with MyWeb 2.0, but Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo says that they’ll probably end up borrowing ideas from each other.
What sort of integration will take place? I’ve been impressed so far with how little Flickr has changed after being acquired by Yahoo, so hopefully delicious has a similar experience. What’s clear is Yahoo! is making a serious Web 2.o play, and is choosing to buy rather than build a lot of these technologies. While Google has also been acquiring startups, they usually don’t acquire companies as high profile as Flickr and delicious. I think a results of this is that a lot of the hip techie crowd is going to start speaking more favorably towards Yahoo. We’ll see.
del.icio.us investor Fred Wilson also comments on the acquisition. Techcrunch was IMing with del.icio.us founder Joshua Schrachter.