Burp!
Yahoo eats del.icio.us. — There's an 'icky' in 'sticky'. — Just a thought. — It's alive! — Syndication and the Live Web Economy is my latest in Linux Journal. (And just under the wire for the Syndicate conference that starts Monday.) One point: … And another:
Context & Ripple Effects
Before Yahoo’s move, del.icio.us had already been framed as more than a personal bookmarking tool: IBM’s enterprise del.icio.us demonstration pointed to organizational uses for shared link collections. The surrounding debate over whether links were becoming obsolete makes ownership of a large, actively maintained link index strategically significant.
The acquisition places a user-contributed bookmarking service inside Yahoo at the same moment the article’s author is arguing for a syndicated, live web economy. That joins community-created link data to a large web company’s distribution and business incentives.
First-order effects
- Yahoo takes control of del.icio.us and its social-bookmarking community, while del.icio.us users become dependent on Yahoo as the service’s owner.
- The deal gives Yahoo a direct position in the collection and organization of links contributed by users rather than assembled solely through its own products.
Second-order effects
- Organizations exploring del.icio.us-style shared bookmarking, including those suggested by IBM’s earlier demonstration, must weigh the convenience of a Yahoo-owned service against reliance on a single platform.
- Yahoo’s ownership raises the value of syndication and interoperability for users who want their bookmarks and link metadata to remain usable beyond one company’s service.
Third-order effects
- If major web companies continue acquiring user-maintained information services, open web activity can become concentrated at platform chokepoints even when the underlying contributions come from distributed communities.
The trend: Social-web services are becoming strategic infrastructure as large internet companies seek control over the user-generated data and distribution networks that make the live web valuable.