Yahoo sold Delicious, so now what?

As you might have heard, Delicious was acquired by AVOS, a new internet company. I've been a fan of Delicious pretty much since Yahoo bought it aback in 2005. About six years later, Yahoo has transferred this great service to a new comany called AVOS. After Yahoo created the plugin for Firefox, Delicious became my primary bookmarking service, I've tried them all and hardly any other service out there is as focused and well executed as Delicious.

I got a little nervous last year when I saw that Yahoo was looking to offload Delicious. Turns out, that Delicious will live on, at least for a little bit but it is now under new management, under this new company named AVOS. AVOS is actually a brand new company, and its founded by the same guys that started YouTube. If you know the story, then you know that Youtube was eventually acquired by Google for an exorbitant amount of money.

So what's next for your delicious bookmarks? Well, first off you need to decide if you want to stick with Delicious or go find something else maybe like Diigo, or Clipmarks. If I may persuade you one way or another, I would suggest that you stick with Delicious for now. I think Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (the new owners of Delicious) will take good care of the service and most likely are going to elevate it to new levels. There is actually a good FAQ about the transition to AVOS from Delicious and I recommend that you read it. I also recommend that you make a backup of your bookmarks, even if you decide to stay with Delicious... it's always good to have a backup. Delicious has a great tool to export your bookmarks.

What's next for Delicious? I can speculate and guess and tell you about all the other speculations I've read but nobody really knows as of right now, where Delicious is going to go. If you ask me, I think the service is going to grow and infuse new features and services that we'll love. Their first order of business is to produce the Firefox4 extension, hopefully Chrome will follow. Trust me, they HAVE to get this Firefox extension working and I really need the Chrome addon as well because I and many others will jump ship if we can't integrate the service into our normal daily browsing experience.

For now, you need to let AVOS transition over your bookmarks if you want to move along with Delicious to its new home. It is clearly expressed on the delicious website, that if you don't accept the transition and agree to move your data over you'll forfeit access to your data after the transition period is over. Delicious is expected to be up and running in its new home around July 2011, but I couldn't find much about when the transition period will actually end. Make sure you follow the instructions to migrate over... you don't want to miss this.