Content Matters

Yahoo announced today that it has acquired social bookmarking / tagging application Del.icio.us.

It’s an interesting acquisition and quite possibly could help make tagging more mainstream.  Del.icio.us has been very successful in the early adopter market, but has hit a bit of a wall in its efforts to “cross the chasm”.  Yahoo obviously provides the market strength to help Del.icio.us move beyond its current user base.

The idea of pushing tagging to the content consumer, rather than the publisher, remains intriguing, though I remain a bit skeptical of how much of a mainstream application it can become.  For years, knowledge and document management vendors tried to get users to tag documents, with little success.  Take a look at the “properties” of the last slide deck someone sent you and you’ll see that even the simplest information (such as author) is rarely updated.

That being said, it’s intriguing to see major web players focused on making their content more accessible.  Rather than putting up walls to try to force users to stay within their site, Yahoo seems to be embracing the open architecture vision of Joshua Schachter and the Del.icio.us team.  This, following the acquisition of Flickr, shows Yahoo has continued interest in social networking and tagging.

Web 2.0 brings the promise of community, social networking and open systems.  Del.icio.us was clearly and early poster child for Web 2.0 and I’m sure there will be many bloggers who curse this deal as a sellout.  However, I think that it will be interesting to see where Yahoo takes Del.icio.us in the months to come.  Whether mainstream users will begin to tags content remains to be seen.  In the meantime, it’s fascinating to see tagging become a hot market.

Congratulations to Joshua Schachter and the Del.icio.us team.

For more information, see posts from Union Square Ventures, Del.icio.us and Jeremy Zawodny of the  Yahoo Search team.