Yahoo Snaps Up Del.icio.us

So, was this story broken by a blog?
I haven't checked yet, but what other blogs were contacted and have posted the news.
No news release? But, since Yahoo! is public, doesn't the SEC require it?
From a PR perspective (my job), very interesting.
Mike

Hi Mike,

So here's the skinny. Joshua emailed to say Yahoo had bought the company and asked if I wanted to chat. I called right away and he had wanted to give a headsup to a few people. Probably because I have covered his company in the past. I didn't check if it was on his blog first, should have!

I'm not an expert on the SEC, but I think the rule of thumb is that when an acquisition is not a major portion of a company's bottom line, they are not required by law to disclose financial terms of the deal.

Jay,

I think that's right, too. My understanding is that if it's not material (read a small deal), you don't have to put out a release.

Define small deal: in the case of Yahoo! small could be millions. Small for Yahoo! maybe, but I bet del.icio.us thinks it's a great deal.

Hooray that there is no press release! They're an old and tired way to communicate news. Blogs will spread the news quickly and efficiently.

Ohhh yeah, believe me the millions that del.icio.us must have gotten wouldn't be immaterial to me! But as to the hard and fast points to the rule, I don't know what it would be.

I never really understood the idea of shared bookmarking. It seems to me that everybody has different bookmarks, simply because everybody has different information needs. These social bookmarking sites are very popular and as a result have a lot of value. Is there a Business Week bookmark site? Thanks.

I just posted a bit at the Tech Beat, where they are covering this. I think the goal Yahoo has is improving search results, which also means better ad placement and what could develop is an entire new method for finding stuff online. You could have less ads that are better targeted. Who wants more ads all over the screen? You could also argue that there are more ads because there is more demand. I've seen sites with more ads than actual content written by people. It seems to me that as search results improve, the need for ads decreases. I guess it could get to the point where things are so easy to find with search results, that you could find most anything without ads. Of course search results often give you poor results because they are so automated, like the telephones are (push #1 to talk to a person). There are ways around telephone automation. People are innovative. Yahoo could replace crawling the web with walking and talking the web.
It should be a big seller!

There is so much information on the internet even on niche topics that it becomes very difficult or impossible to keep up with the topics of one’s interest. Tagging allows people to find out and store what others have found useful on a given topic. Hence sites like del.icio.us are great sources of useful information, since all that you find on these sites are the favourite articles or blogs of people.

The aim of most of the web entrepreneurs is to get acquired by a bigger player in return for a multi-million dollar fortune, and hence no surprise that Joshua sold his brainchild to an internet powerhouse. For Yahoo, this acquisition takes it one step closer to being the one-stop portal of the future. With all the hoopla surrounding Web 2.0 (a term no one is quite sure what it means), this indeed sounds like tech bubble 2.0! But as someone said, you never know you are in a bubble until it goes 'plop'. We’ll know in a few years’ time…