YouTube founders acquire social bookmarking site Delicious from Yahoo!

Yahoo!’s once seemingly ill-fated social bookmarking service Delicious has been sold to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen for an undisclosed sum. Delicious will now fold into a newly created internet company AVOS.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site used by millions to save, share and discover websites and useful content around the world. Although still described as the “leading social bookmarking service”, the site’s popularity decline in recent years had prompted Yahoo! to actively seek a buyer since last December. Many of its once loyal users, including myself, have chosen to desert Delicious in lieu of the universality and effectiveness of Twitter.

CEO of AVOS Chad Hurley said of the deal,

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level.

“We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

Delicious will continue to operate normally until at least July 2011, when a transition of user data will begin. Existing Delicious users will be asked to agree to let Yahoo! transfer bookmarks to AVOS when they next log in. One of the first improvements we can likely expect from AVOS will may be a Firefox 4 compatible extension.