The “hands-off” promise is both necessary to make and impossible to keep.

I remember hearing the promise from Jim Bankoff, who engineered AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. in the fall of 2005, at a Weblogs retreat in New York. (Bankoff is currently CEO of Vox Media.) He meant it, and Weblogs was indeed given a long leash. Jason Calacanis, Brian Alvey and Judith Meskill operated the blog network as before the acquisition, with better technology infrastructure and a better hiring budget.

I was editorial director of Weblogs, and eventually took over business ownership of the unit after the founders left the company. For four post-honeymoon years in that position I had a close-up view of how multiple stakeholders in a large parent company systematically and necessarily break the well-intended “hands-off” promise. Even on a long leash, the startup plays a sometimes ferocious defensive game to maintain cultural and brand integrity.

David Karp will continue to own Tumblr within Yahoo, but he will not be the only owner. Marissa Mayer will be co-owner. Mayer was already — in the same hour as the obligatory “hands-off” covenant — outlining possible changes. Other departmental executives will surface in Tumblr stakeholder roles, especially sales, business development, legal and the editorial team of Yahoo’s main portal. Putting Tumblr into Yahoo is like throwing a boulder into a lake, and many executives will be accountable for maximizing the ripples. They are all co-owners.

Mayer specifically addressed the branding concern, promising that Yahoo would not slap its mark on Tumblr pages. That’s a no-brainer, although Yahoo has fallen into the trap of over-valuing its brand in past acquisitions, notably Flickr. But some degree of co-branding is inevitable, probably immediately, if Yahoo wants to capture comScore recognition of Tumblr’s traffic.

And it surely does. Major Internet properties, and their advertisers, are acutely aware of comScore positioning. At AOL, within minutes of comScore’s release of its monthly traffic report, I watched that thing rip through the company like a viral meme. In March of this year, Yahoo’s total U.S. traffic (that’s the filter most companies and their advertisers look at) put the company in the No. 2 spot, trailing Google by a mere one million unique visitors. That same month, Tumblr was credited with 29 million uniques. A certain post-acquisition bet is that Yahoo will do what it takes to vault over Google into the top slot.

And it takes co-branding. ComScore requires some mark of affiliation to acknowledge and report the traffic roll-up from an independently branded property to its parent entity. That’s why you see AOL’s logo in the footers of Engadget and TechCrunch, two sites where AOL’s mark hardly contributes brand charisma.

ComScore roll-up branding doesn’t really damage a professionally-produced editorial site. But there is greater sensitivity in a UGC (User Generated Content) destination where there is huge overlap of those who consume the content and those who produce it. The uproar among Tumblr bloggers over the acquisition is the first sign that the engine of Tumblr’s success does not want any affiliation with corporate overlords.

Speaking of UGC, it represents all sorts of trouble that will bring new influences to bear within Yahoo. Advertisers do not like appearing next to UGC. They don’t even like comments on pro sites, never mind the roiling swirl of unregulated blogs. Yahoo will create a monetization plan (Mayer is already leaking ideas and aspirations), and the company’s board and executive committee will synchronize Tumblr’s revenue potential with the drumbeat of quarterly reporting. Forecasts, operating budgets, timetables and deliverables will seep into the sales organization like wine into carpet. In meeting after meeting between sales and content, sanctity around Tumblr’s exemption from business as usual will be chipped away. To a category sales director, “hands-off” means not meeting a revenue deliverable, and getting a reduced annual bonus.

Advertising on Tumblr blogs is easy to predict, although who knows when. Run-of-service campaigns are clearly impossible for brand advertisers, and would be even without the heavy load of Tumblr porn blogs. The ability to produce specially-carved campaigns will have to be built into the publishing system, if it isn’t already. That slippery slope leads to possible special arrangements with highly-trafficked blogs, and a possibility of editorial management to some degree.

Enter the lawyer stakeholders. Yahoo’s legal stance for Tumblr will be based on “safe harbor,” a protection in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that applies to UGC platforms whose owners do not exercise control of the content. Safe harbor is punctured like a balloon with the first bit of content oversight. If that happens, every legal complaint brought over publication of copyrighted media becomes Yahoo’s liability for damages, even if the infringing media is removed. (With safe harbor protection, Yahoo only needs to remove the source of a legal complaint.)

Online advertising is a buyer’s market in which advertisers often dictate terms and conditions. Tumblr will be caught in the tectonic grinding of conflicting interests. Tumblr’s founding principles demand freedom. Yahoo’s business requires revenue from the hordes of Tumblr users. The legal wing values safety above everything. The next quarterly always looms, and the questioning for years will be about Tumblr’s income, just as with AOL’s Patch and other daunting monetization projects.

Let’s not forget about synergy, the great M&A buzzword that informs all discussions leading up to the big purchase. Any company with many moving parts must consider how a major acquisition is going to play nicely with its other brands, technologies and cultures. An acquisition that brings a substantial audience with it is eventually going to be asked (which is to say, required) to share that traffic. If synergy is a dominant pre-acquisition buzzword in large content companies, recirculation is the post-acquisition mandate.

From this essential business goal comes a creeping incremental destruction of purity. The first sign might be a modest, inconspicuous footer on Tumblr blogs with softly-hued links to other Yahoo properties. Giving away that inch could result, a year later, in dreaded “related links” modules in the sidebar. From there it is a bold and victorious leap to universal headers with full co-branding and drop-down promos for Yahoo’s Mail and News enterprises.

I’m being cynical, and these are not explicit predictions. The honeymoon period is characterized by respect and caution. Weblogs brought completely new DNA into the AOL organism. Tumblr is likewise fresh air — loaded with a young demographic — for Yahoo. But Yahoo also has experience with social content (Delicious and Flickr), and Mayer is certainly determined to chart a better roadmap for Tumblr on her watch.

But the pressure will be on, sooner or later. Many jobs are a little more at risk when a company has spent over a billion dollars, and Tumblr will start showing the smudges of many fingerprints. It might all work out well. Nearly all of AOL’s most successful content destinations were acquired. (Others, like Bebo, were catastrophic, and the high burn rate to maintain Patch is controversial.) Tumblr could be Yahoo’s most successful bet, despite the many hands that will inevitably be laid upon it.

Brad Hill is the former VP of Audience Development at AOL, and former General Manager of Weblogs, Inc.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, the Tumblr brand will continue on in the wake of its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo.

That includes definitive promises by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to once-sale-shy Tumblr CEO David Karp to allow him to shepherd the fast-growing blogging product, with no forced integration with Yahoo’s many other content properties.

That said, sources added, there will be more back-end changes to marry infrastructure, such as undergirding Tumblr’s nascent advertising business and giving it more distribution opportunities.

“At the beginning, at least, it’ll be hands-off,” said one person close to the situation. “It has to be.”

While that is probably no surprise, it’s still good news for Tumblr employees as well as its very opinionated user base, which is not likely to greet a takeover by a corporate giant of the social, iconoclastic user-generated content service.

That said, Yahoo execs discussed and are aware of issues around porn published on the site, although they believe it to be fixable over time.

As Peter Kafka noted:

To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.

By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.

Or, as a Tumblr investor also told Kafka: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard-follower model, opt-in.”

Moving on from porn, sources close to the situation — okay, pretty much everyone is chit-chatting away now — said that Mayer spent a lot of time with Karp (who was in Silicon Valley last week, in fact, visiting her) about the transition, and about how the new ownership would impact him and the service.

One source called them “kindred spirits” on the issue, and that Mayer has been given great purview by the Yahoo board to foster Tumblr to prevent it from turning out like Flickr, Delicious and many other big acquisitions dating back to GeoCities. (I was there covering that deal way back when, and what a mess that was!)

Mayer is well-liked by product and engineering entrepreneurs, and has often focused on them at Yahoo, over the perhaps more important demands of business and advertising execs.

That would appeal to Karp, who once famously said that online advertising made him physically sick. Still, he has recently begun to embrace ad sales at Tumblr.

Within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages on users’ dashboards, which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year, and sources said it could get to up to $100 million this year.

“We’re going to be very careful here,” said a source with knowledge of the acquisition.

A source at Tumblr agreed: “This will be a very delicate dance, since so much could go wrong if done without care.”

Still, some at Yahoo are worried that the company might be chasing the youthful demographic at Tumblr too assiduously. “This is a very fickle audience,” said another high-ranking Yahoo exec. “Chasing a young one is a very tricky thing.”

Yes, indeed, but Mayer thinks she is the one to be able to pull it off and make Yahoo relevant with an even wider consumer base.

AllThingsD broke news of the deal in the offing last week, which has since been approved by Yahoo’s board.

But Bitly wants to be more than a souped-up link shortener, and today it is relaunching its site as a social bookmarking aggregator, a la Delicious or Pinterest.

Bitly is already at the center of lots of online activity — but only as a conduit. It has become a massive infrastructure project; more than 25 billion Bitly links have been created, and they get clicked on 300 million times per day. Following Bitly’s lead, Twitter, Facebook and Google all launched their own link shorteners.

The new Bitly site, which is rolling out to users starting today, is now centered around personal pages of saved links — kind of like the simplest blog you could imagine.

Instead of bookmarks, Bitly calls these “bitmarks.” Users can create bundles of bitmarks on a certain topic, write personal notes about them and make them public, private or co-curated.

Then there are a bunch of things people can do with their links and other people’s links:

• They can search through them with a very fast search engine.
• They can save them for nicely formatted reading offline in an iPhone app.
• They can tell Bitly to add any link they post to Twitter to their bitmarks, even if it wasn’t originally saved through Bitly.
• They can look through an aggregated “network view” of all the things their Facebook and Twitter contacts have shared, like a Facebook News Feed, but just for interesting links. (Note: This network view currently can’t be viewed on mobile, which is too bad, as it could be a nice way to gather offline reading materials; I suppose it might be a copyright issue.)
• They can see all sorts of interesting stats about who was first to share each link, and how much it has been viewed globally.

Unlike the current Bitly, which is a tool for power users and paying enterprise customers, the redesigned site is explicitly meant to be a mainstream consumer product, Bitly Head of Product Matthew Rothenberg told me. “The URL is the basic unit of currency for the Web. Finding and sharing is something that affects everyone,” he contended.

But Rothenberg — who previously led product at Yahoo’s Flickr and joined Bitly a year ago with the intent of building this consumer product — said that Bitly’s current functionality would remain intact for its existing users.

Bitly product head Matthew "Mroth" Rothenberg

Basically, the new consumer Web site is a way to invert what Bitly has done for four years, and to make a bid to be a destination rather than just a pass-through for traffic.

But why do a social bookmarking site now? Haven’t so many people tried that without mainstream success, until the photo-driven Pinterest?

About the competition, Rothenberg replied, “We are much more focused on this notion of a utility product, in which you can save and organize any URL to any destination; and if you don’t want to share it, you can save it privately, as well.”

Also, for the moment, Bitly also isn’t doing any automated “Open Graph” sharing out to Facebook, leaving on the table a potential big driver of traffic and new users. That was a conscious decision. “We want to make sharing an explicit action,” Rothenberg explained.

Bitly, which spun out of Betaworks and has also recently been discussed as an acquisition target, is backed by RRE Ventures and others, and is in the process of raising Series C funding, as has been reported (though The Verge initially implied the funding round had closed, and from what I understand it has not yet).

Update: Bitly Stands by Redesign Despite User Complaints

The deal indicates new directions for Klout, which to date had not been particularly focused on mobile or local.

Blockboard made a neighborhood discussion board iPhone app that had only been available in its hometown of San Francisco. Its team of four had previously been at companies like Delicious and Craigslist. When I covered the company, I noted that it has more of a Twitter approach to a local social network, where competitor Nextdoor requires real identities, a la Facebook.

Klout said that Blockboard’s app would continue to be available, and that its team would work to improve Klout’s local and mobile efforts.

Klout received a rich valuation in its most recent funding round, which closed last November but was only announced in January. Blockboard, meanwhile, had raised $1 million in 2010 from Joshua Schachter, Mitch Kapor, Founder Collective and others.

That’s because AVOS today announced it is buying Trunk.ly “to accelerate link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious,” said AVOS CEO Chad Hurley.

Trunk.ly is a two-man Australian social bookmarking start-up that earlier this fall flagged AVOS’ relaunched Delicious as “one step forward, two steps back.” (They weren’t the only ones being critical; many users were up in arms about lost features and underwhelming new stuff after AVOS took Delicious over from Yahoo.)

Trunk.ly, which was founded just under a year ago, will be shut down over the next two months and its co-founders will apply their know-how to Delicious.

Here’s the relevant portion of the critical blog post from September by Trunk.ly’s Alex Dong:

Two steps back

1) The main way to get links into delicious is still via bookmarklet. Given the high ratio of people using facebook and twitter, why should I manually bookmark a link if I have already retweeted it? Or liked it in my little walled garden?

Trunk.ly provides 10+ connectors into popular social networks. Setup once and links will start coming in automatically.

2) Lack of a solid social search. The playlist for the web is a great concept but will your interior “design” tag mean the same as my software “design” tag? Tagging as a device to build a taxonomy starts to collapse when people use same tag for different things. Quora solves this problem quite well by labouring out a taxonomy of its own.

Trunk.ly provides a search interface so essentially you have your own google for your links as well as your friends. There’s no need to tag – you can if you want, but you don’t have to in order to create value.

I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

Snip.it is functionally very similar to a bookmarking service like Delicious, allowing users to share pages through a browser bookmarklet and group them in thematic connections. Other users can then subscribe to those collections.

Start-ups like Tumblr and Pinterest thrive in part because users can express themselves through content that other people have posted. Often it’s far easier to pin or reblog a photo or quote than to compose a blog post or a pithy tweet. Snip.it hopes to extend that kind of activity to sharing news stories and other content accompanied by a line or two of opinion from the poster.

Snip.it launches an invitation-only beta today and should be open to the public in about a month. At this point it requires a Facebook account to register.

The company is funded by Khosla Ventures (where Adeeb was formerly a principal), True Ventures, Charles River Ventures and SV Angel.

Even for a hermit like me, it seems evident that there are local social opportunities beyond deals and check-ins. It’s an area ripe for social Web and app development.

Today, a start-up called Nextdoor launches an authenticated network of social networks for neighborhoods. The service is utilitarian and carefully focused on fostering small private communities.

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia pitched his site to me like this: You have Facebook for your friends and family, LinkedIn for your business network, and Twitter for your interest graph. But what about your local community?

Nextdoor itself is kind of like Facebook, which started out requiring student users to authenticate with their .edu email addresses, and still requires real names. The Nextdoor site is built to be a safe haven for sharing personal information with a small, relevant audience, and it verifies that users actually live in a neighborhood, using postcard codes and phone listings.

But do you really want to share so much of your identity with your neighbors? And do you want to depend on a site like Nextdoor reaching critical mass so that you can talk to people who live down the street?

Another local social start-up, Blockboard, is taking a different approach. It’s more like Twitter, where users can represent themselves however they want. It’s also focused on mobile, and has so far only launched in San Francisco.

Blockboard’s authentication is much simpler than Nextdoor’s. The first time someone uses the Blockboard iPhone app, it validates via GPS that they are located in a particular neighborhood. (Once they’re registered to that community, they don’t have to be physically there to post.) Users usually use pseudonyms.

Blockboard CEO Stephen Hood — whose team comes from the laissez-faire community sites Delicious and Craigslist — said he thinks real identities aren’t that important to communicating local information like event postings, apartment listings, and lost and found.

Plus, keeping local information private is a bit of a red herring, Hood argued. “People aren’t interested in pretending to be in neighborhoods they’re not in, because the content is not relevant,” he said.

Hood thinks a successful local social network must start on mobile devices in order to become a resource when people are out and about in their neighborhoods.

And maybe someday, if all goes well, those local social network users may put down their phones and actually talk to each other.

The social bookmarking service Delicious, now owned by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s AVOS, this week relaunched with some new features — and according to its existing users, too few of the old ones. And they seem to have pretty good cause for complaint.

Though Delicious’s six years being owned by Yahoo had resulted in little change and much neglect, loyal users saw the new Delicious team’s additions of playlist-like “Stacks” as no compensation for the removal of core RSS feed, browser extensions and tagging features. They spewed their anger in comment threads (like ours), on Twitter, on Facebook, in blog posts and on Delicious.

You can fault the new Delicious team for rushing their launch and underestimating their users’ expectations, but at least they’ve spent the week responding across those mediums; they also added a new “beta status” blog and help account on Twitter. On Twitter alone, the team has sent hundreds of tweet responses to user complaints.

Asked to explain what the AVOS team was thinking, and whether they regretted the way it was done, spokesman Mike Manning replied, “We’ve been focused on making the transition from Yahoo happen as fast as possible. Because of this, we needed to reduce some functionality in the short term and introduce a basic set of new features to get the site out the door. From our standpoint, it’s a competitive market and we’re going to err on the side of speed versus perfection to hopefully build a larger, more compelling experience. We’ll always be listening to the community and will literally be updating the product on a daily basis.”

Now that the migration is complete, the new Delicious team is adding back key features and quashing bugs, Manning said. User tags have been restored, the various extensions have now been fixed, and unmigrated user data is filtering in. But there’s still plenty of stuff missing (for instance, posting links to Twitter and changing network privacy settings; see here), and many users who feel betrayed and say they’ve already switched to alternatives like Pinboard and Diigo.

I reached out to some of the users who had commented here about their dismay over the redesign, and asked whether they were satisfied with Delicious’s post-launch response. While it’s not a representative sample, those who replied said it was a matter of a certain favorite feature or two being restored, and they’re likely to continue using Delicious now that the features are coming back.

But at the same time, Delicious’s Manning said previous users are not the only ones on the company’s mind. “We chose to simplify the experience and refocus on making Delicious a mainstream destination to discover content,” he said.

“Mainstream” is obviously the key word there. Delicious had five million registered users as of 2008, when founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo. (Schachter, by the way, is also cranky about the changes.) While the user numbers have always been relatively small, this week’s outcry makes it clear that those people got value from the service. It’s yet to be seen whether the new “stacks” would ever inspire this kind of devotion.

Expectations aren’t terrifically high for the new Delicious, given the rareness of tech comeback stories and the fact that Delicious was never really that popular. But we can’t help but watch, given Hurley and Chen’s magic touch at YouTube.

The new Delicious retains a lot of visual elements from the old site, but it tweaks the core user activity to be about creating “stacks” of content. In an interview on Monday, Hurley compared stacks to YouTube playlists, saying he thinks the way to go mainstream is by enabling users to express their interests.

(Click to see a larger version of the fantastic “Dog Costumes That Should Be Illegal” stack pictured at right, and check out more screenshots and a demo video at the bottom of this post.)

Here’s a write-up of my chat with Hurley:

AllThingsD: How does it feel to be starting over again, and with a product many people have expectations for, rather than your own fresh new idea?

Chad Hurley: For the product — and for myself and Steve — we’re both starting over and we’re really excited about it. In Delicious’s case, it’s a great brand that belongs in Silicon Valley. We look forward to providing a great service and hopefully introducing it to a bigger audience. From myself and Steve’s perspective, it feels good to be engaged again on finding a simple solution to a difficult problem, which is discovery.

How is this different from the original Delicious?

It became hard when people were adding all this information, tags and links. We’re applying a new layer of ways for people to explore the information. Relating to YouTube terms, playlists were an underappreciated feature of the site, and we saw an opportunity to introduce that concept in a broader sense against all media.

What of the old Delicious did you make sure to keep the same?

We’re keeping the brand and the logo and the utility — having a bookmarklet and all that will stay intact. We’re trying to add one layer of functionality, initially, to explore the links contributed on a daily basis. For us, this is really just the start. We have a lot more features waiting in the wings. We spent a lot of time rewriting the code, redoing the infrastructure and migrating the site over.

Do you think people have a fundamental desire to make lists and bookmark things?

With YouTube — with the Internet in general — you have information overload. The people who don’t necessarily get credit are the curators. We had the YouTube stars, but I always wanted to start a program called YouTube scouts.

It’s interesting that you’re emphasizing curation in a week when Facebook is pushing a new agenda of automated sharing.

At Facebook, they want as many signals in as possible, and that’s great, but right now it’s really noise. We’re really looking for the signal. It’s great to have passive links to share information, and I’m a fan of what they’re doing. I think people get burned out of actively participating. That’s what we did at YouTube, in a way — a really open viewing and sharing experience, where we never asked users to sign in. At Delicious, we’re trying to do that again here — people can get value without signing in.

Back to the original Delicious, there seem to have been a lot of services over the years from then to now that help you bookmark things and create lists. None of them in particular seem to have been that popular, though Pinterest seems to have been doing well lately. Why do you think the timing is right for you guys to pursue this?

There’s a lot of people working on this problem, a lot of people trying to address the problem of discovery and leveraging curation. We’re trying to create a broad functionality and audience. Some of these services are great, but they end up being restrictive. We want to celebrate diversity and we want a global audience with many different interests. This is just the initial stack we’re introducing on top of Delicious, and there will be many more features.

What are your plans to spread and grow the new Delicious, especially based on your experience of encouraging virality at YouTube?

I think actions speak louder than words. We want the product to hopefully grow on its own. We’ll do some traditional forms of marketing, but I feel if we have a compelling product that adds value, we’ll hopefully make it increasingly more attractive for people to spend their time with us.

The new Delicious sounds a lot like the old Delicious brought up to date. The upcoming design is reportedly aimed at solving “the information discovery problem” and will feature “stacks,” a.k.a. topical collections of content, as well as personalization features.

Chen and Hurley said that part of the charm of the endeavor lies in trying to revive one of the pioneering services of the social Web — though they weren’t necessarily big Delicious users the first time around.

Delicious is being rebuilt by a team of 15 in San Mateo, Calif., and is due to relaunch later this year. Chen and Hurley also bought social media analytics company Tap11 to incorporate into Delicious.

After Delicious was bought, Schachter worked at Yahoo and Google and made a bunch of angel investments, but now he’s finally back to working on an independent product: Jig.

Schachter describes Jig as a marketplace for social transactions. The first version of Jig is a Web site about needs: Someone posts a request, other people make suggestions, and the original asker notifies everyone when he or she feels a solution has been found.

An underlying goal of Jig’s approach is to more efficiently allocate users’ attention, Schachter said in an interview with AllThingsD on Friday. He said he feels that other social Web services focus too much attention on popular people and topics — rather than more precise, meaningful and useful connections between people.

Jig comes out of Tasty Labs, a start-up Schachter co-founded with Nick Nguyen (formerly at Delicious and Mozilla) and Paul Rademacher (formerly at Google, and creator of the seminal HousingMaps Google Maps-Craigslist mashup) with funding from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Here’s a lightly edited write-up of my chat with Schachter on Friday:

AllThingsD: So congrats on the launch!

Joshua Schachter: We hadn’t actually meant to launch till Monday. We invited the 3,000 people on our list last night, and someone ignored the [instructions that said] don’t blog or post it. Then it made it to the Hacker News, and that was that. Everybody wrote it up at this point, so we got a few thousand sign-ups, so I guess that was our launch.

Many people have put quite a bit more effort and pain into launching.

It was the most pleasant launch I’ve been through yet. The site didn’t go down, and people were less asshats than I expected.

So, backing up, where did the idea for Jig come from?

When I was at Yahoo, I realized Yahoo Answers was sort of a painfully bad product, basically hostage to the form of Q&A itself. If you make it seem more general, you have a lot more opportunity to build a system that’s better for people. So we’re hoping to connect people, whether it’s about information, goods or something else. Needs are the first thing we’re building. Maybe offers will be next.

But Jig does feel like a Q&A site, with people posting requests and other people responding.

Yes and no. A lot of these sites take away your identity, take away your answers. The Web has been more about information — consuming and producing content — but we’re sort of about who are the people involved, what’s been done already. We’re trying to figure out a low-cost, efficient way trying to get social transactions to the place they’re trying to be.

What’s your stance on real names?

I sort of get it now — it’s jarring to see a first name and last name and profile picture next to someone that’s only using a first name and no picture. I think that people with identity in the system will get trusted more. I understand the anxiety about continuity between real people and pseudonyms. I want people to have an identity, but I don’t care which one it is.

How important are communities versus the larger user base?

We’re still figuring that out. We did build something called affiliations, sort of a mix of badges and groups. We’re trying to build a marketplace, and marketplaces are about trust, so if I get a piece of information from someone and that person is in my neighborhood or a friend of a friend, I have a little bit more trust.

Are you building any sort of underlying structure to make existing knowledge useful? Or is each question a blank slate?

That will probably only be something we could do if we had more data. If we can take advantage of fungibility of knowledge, that would be awesome, but it’s not our top priority. Right now we have a bit of a spam problem and UI bugs [that are higher priorities].

Why start with your own Web site, rather than an app or building on someone else’s platform?

The activity of “I need to do something, does anyone know how to do this?” felt right to do on the Web. We will do mobile stuff in the future, because people want to know stuff about places and local things. It’s probably not right for a desktop app.

Do you see a continuous line between Delicious, your other roles, and Jig?

We did a series of prototypes, and our first prototype, which this came out of, was actually about tagging people. People would tag people with the needs that I have, and it’s still there but hard to see. The need was the tag, and now it just got a little bigger and heavier. People keep asking for classifications — maybe we should do that, I don’t know.

I feel like you, of all people, would be thinking about how to use tagging.

I’m very wary of people tagging their own content, because they’ll try to design for the largest possible audience.

Why is Jig better than asking questions on a social network, or on a dedicated Q&A site?

The idea is that we will try and route attention to your need, and then when it’s done, we take it away. The goal is to efficiently spread out attention.

These sites like Google+ have a problem with the rich getting bigger, where Scoble will post and it always bubbles up to the top. That’s the long tail enforcing the long tail.

We want to get needs in front of the person most likely to resolve them. We’re couching it in the language of a social network, but underneath it’s not an activity stream, because we actually found that doesn’t work well at all.

In a press release the purchase was explained as a means to help recommend content to Delicious users.

We plan to leverage our Volume™ algorithm to fully measure the impact of content consumed and shared across the social ecosystem,” said Braxton Woodham, Tap11′s CTO. “In combination with Delicious.com, we will be able to provide consumers and publishers with deep, relevant insights and recommendations.”

Tap11 emerged from Zannel, a mobile social networking start-up founded in 2006 that had focused on video early on. Throughout its various incarnations, the San Francisco-based company had raised $16 million from US Venture Partners, Palomar Ventures and Alloy Ventures.

Tap11 had eight employees as of March. AVOS said it is retaining Tap11 CEO Adam Zbar as head of business operations & strategy and CTO Woodham as head of engineering, but didn’t mention the others.

Here’s a video from a recent GigaOM conference where Woodham describes Tap11 as the “Omniture of the Real-time Web.”

Their first move is not an obvious one: they are buying the neglected remains of the Delicious social bookmarking site from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount.

AVOS promises that Delicious users can continue to use the site after they accept a new privacy policy. The company’s first priority, according to an FAQ, is launching a new Firefox 4 extension.

Hurley and Chen, both immensely rich from their success with YouTube, are no longer running the Google-owned video site’s day-to-day operations. Chen left as CTO circa June 2009, while Hurley officially handed over CEO duties to Salar Kamangar in October 2010.

Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Founder Joshua Schachter is now running a new company, Tasty Labs. Yahoo had announced internally that it would “sunset” Delicious in December.

Here’s the full release and statement from Yahoo:

Yahoo! Statement
Today YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announced they have acquired the Delicious technology from Yahoo!. They plan to continue the service that users have come to know and love and make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content.

Providing a smooth transition for users is important to both companies. There will be a transition period where users can elect to sign up for a new account. Users’ public and private bookmarks will be maintained through the transition period and transferred as they are today when it is complete.

As we have said, part of our product strategy involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation. We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop.

Press Release
YOUTUBE FOUNDERS ACQUIRE DELICIOUS FROM YAHOO!

Promise Users the Same Great Service And Even Easier & More Fun Ways To Save, Share, and Discover the Web’s “Tastiest” Content.

San Francisco, CA., – April 26, 2011 – Delicious.com, the leading social bookmarking service, has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest” content. Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company.

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

“We spoke with numerous parties interested in acquiring the site, and chose Chad and Steve based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious,” said John Matheny, SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo!.

The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

About Delicious
Delicious is the leading social bookmarking service for saving, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Started in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, Delicious has built a passionate, worldwide community of millions of users. In 2011, Delicious was acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Previously, they co-founded YouTube, the world’s largest video site in 2005, which was acquired by Google 18 months later for $1.76B. Delicious is part of AVOS, a new Internet company based in San Mateo, California.

The basic +1 function allows users to recommend a Web page by clicking on a small +1 button next to search results. These votes are aggregated globally, but logged-in users will see the pictures and names of their connections who have “+1′ed” a link.

Just as with Facebook’s “like” button, all +1′s are public. But +1 doesn’t have the social feedback you might get by sharing a link on Facebook or Twitter, or the option to annotate links with your comments.

This is only rolling out gradually, though users can opt in to try +1 at www.google.com/experimental. It’s part of a larger effort to get Google users to start maintaining their Google Profiles–which are obviously key to the grand Google social plan.

For now, users can choose to make their +1′s available as a tab on their Google Profile, but there’s no activity stream that brings together friends’ likes.

Another limitation: right now +1 is only for users’ connections on Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Reader and Google Buzz. Support for connections on other services like Twitter is “coming soon.”

Yet another feature coming soon: +1 buttons for publishers, which they can add alongside the other colorful doodads for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and perhaps even Google Buzz.

One feature that’s ready at launch is +1 for ads, a highly unusual move in Silicon Valley where monetization is usually relegated to a lower priority. +1 buttons will appear next to Google ads and show which users have clicked on them, just like +1 for search. Advertisers don’t have to pay for the feature but will get reporting on how many +1s they get.

Google already has multiple social search features currently rolled out, and has experimented with users voting on search results in the past through tools like Google SearchWiki (which is no longer available).

Stellar does not seem to be a huge departure from the bookmarking site Delicious or the reblogging site Tumblr, but it’s pretty and easy to scan. Kottke said in a blog post that “a few dozen” people have tried the service, and he will let more in “reeeeally sloooowly.”

Regardless of the rough draftiness of it all, Kottke’s popularity as a blogger means invites will be much coveted.

Stellar shows each user’s “faves” in reverse chronological order, as well as who else has liked the content. It also does the inverse: Showing which of that user’s content has been liked by other users. You can see what it looks like on Kottke’s own page here.

Early Adopter is all about emerging trends and the chewy little companies that creep in to define emerging spaces.

For a couple of years, I’ve been watching companies expand the conception of what APIs can be used for.

As the complexity and utility of those data pipes grow, companies have been adopting another trend: One that places graphic and interface design at the center of a new product, as much as the engineering and programming that makes it function.

This is a trend that ifttt founder Linden Tibbets has been thinking about as well.

Ifttt, (pronounced “ift”) stands for “if this, then that,” which über-geeks will recognize as a foundational logic and programming action.

The concept is simple. When one state is reached, an action will automatically be triggered.

For example, there is an “if” function inside the computer that controls the automatic wipers on a car. If rain is sensed, then the wipers turn on.

Ifttt pulls a user’s Web services out of their silos and allows those automatic if functions to take place across several services at once–essentially allowing users to easily connect several APIs end-to-end.

In the case of Tibbets’s ifttt Web app, the user chooses from channels to create the if situation, and then from other channels to have the output, or the then-that action. All of the ifs and thens are gathered from the growing API-driven Web.

Got it?

Although bootstrapped and still in private beta, ifttt is already building up an impressive set of services that can help users connect to and semi-automate.

As of today, ifttt already connects to and enables actions between several Web clipping services, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Evernote, Flickr, phone–both voice and text–and even craigslist.

Each channel has its own set of action choices, depending both on what the service is used for and what actions are acessable via that service’s API.

Actions can be as simple as automatically sending the user a text message when the weather changes to rainy (not a new trick), or as complex as automatically uploading an image to Facebook whenever the user uploads that photo to flicker with the tag “Facebook.”

“Right now we are focused on adding more channels and listening to what users want to use the service for,” said Tibbets.

He explained that he and co-founder Jesse Tane are working on integration with cloud file service dropbox, as well as on Google Chat integration.

Tibbets comes to ifttt after a few years situated right between the design and tech spaces.

After attending Santa Clara College on a basketball scholarship (he’s around 6′ 6″) and graduating with a computer engineering degree, he spent time working on games at Elecronic Arts before moving to Palo Alto, Calif.-based design darling IDEO.

Tibbets spent the last three years working on internal social-sharing projects at IDEO, before founding ifttt and launching the Web app of the same name in early November of 2010.

Ifttt is useful for sending yourself notifications, but Tibbets believes the real value is in creating connections between the Web services available in ifttt.

The zeitgeist for APIs use is to channel info out of one Web service and into another, as defined by a single site or app maker. Tibbets’s efforts put individuals more at the center of how their information flows around them.

This concept can get complicated in a hurry, and that’s where others have failed, at least according to Tibbets.

He explained: “It’s about usability, and being simple enough to understand and implement in your own life. Ifttt began more complex, but we cut a lot out of it, to make it simple enough to understand quickly.”

Indeed, lack of simplicity may be what keeps services like Yahoo’s Pipes, which can do many of the same things ifttt can, from becoming popular with a broader consumer group.

Ifttt is also developing native mobile apps that will focus on ultra-simple activation of an ifttt task.

He said that a major barrier to him doing certain things on a mobile device is that he feels it is just anti-social to have his phone out for more than 20 seconds.

To alleviate the anti-social dilemma, ifttt’s mobile apps will focus on quickly activating preprogrammed tasks.

Ifttt co-founder Tane is working full time on the apps, although there is no release date set.

Tibbets admits that ifttt is still little more of an idea and a high-resolution prototype than it is a full-fledged product. But his hopes hang on his philosophy about how to build value, which is either a little counter to, or ahead of, the current trend in Web apps.

“Our value won’t be built on adding your friends or sharing functionality to some other service,” he said. “Ours will be about creating something that would still be a valuable if there were only 20 people left on earth and none of them were your friends.”

We sat Tibbets down (literally, we had to make him sit or we wouldn’t have been able to reach to get good video) near ifttt’s San Francisco headquarters to get the quick rundown on ifttt’s present and future. Enjoy the video.

(Early Adopter is a new column on early-stage start-ups and ideas written weekly by Drake Martinet.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110211/early-adopter-connect-your-personal-data-pipes-together-with-ifttts-digital-duct-tape/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110104/delicious-red-sea-parted-users-wander-to-other-bookmarking-services/ http://allthingsd.com/20110104/delicious-red-sea-parted-users-wander-to-other-bookmarking-services/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:35:13 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34779 Since Yahoo’s plans to “sunset” popular bookmarking service Delicious leaked last month, it is natural to assume that users would be looking elsewhere to store their link libraries.

What we didn’t know, until now, is how greatly other link services would benefit from news of the closure.

Late last week, Delicious competitor Pinboard tweeted a link to a screenshot of its traffic graph from the couple of days following the Yahoo leak, overlaid on more-typical traffic from previous days.

The sea-foam green area is Pinboard traffic after the leak, in number of server requests per minute (not unique or new visitors, which would undoubtedly be far lower).

The tiny blue and purple areas beneath represent typical request rates.

You can click on the graph to see it in full size, though the sense of scale speaks for itself.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/delicious-red-sea-parted-users-wander-to-other-bookmarking-services/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/salesforce-buys-small-contact-management-startup-etacts/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/salesforce-buys-small-contact-management-startup-etacts/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:59:28 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1526 Salesforce has bought Etacts, maker of a contacts management tool, according to a source familiar with the matter. Etacts informed users today that it will shut down as of January 31 in order to “pursue other opportunities.”

Etacts, which participated in the Y Combinator program earlier this year, offered a free Web app and plug-ins that helped Gmail and IMAP users manage their email relationships by showing information about their contacts’ social Web activity and communication history.

The start-up, co-founded by recent Duke grads Howie Liu and Evan Beard, had raised $650,000 in funding from Ron Conway of SV Angels, Eric Hahn of Inventures Group, Jim Young from Hot or Not, Lorenzo Thione and Barney Pell from Powerset, Joshua Schachter from Delicious, and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. And I believe Ashton Kutcher was involved as well.

Etacts will no longer accept user sign-ups as of today and will delete all user data effective January 31, it said in an email sent to users.

Etacts’s product was quite similar to that of another Y Combinator company, Rapportive. Salesforce also just bought another YC company this month, Heroku, for $212 million in cash.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/salesforce-buys-small-contact-management-startup-etacts/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101216/following-layoffs-yahoo-cuts-products-mybloglog-delicious-yahoo-buzz/ http://allthingsd.com/20101216/following-layoffs-yahoo-cuts-products-mybloglog-delicious-yahoo-buzz/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:58:59 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1375 At an all-hands meeting for the Yahoo product team following a round of layoffs yesterday that significantly impacted that group, Chief Product Officer Blake Irving showed off a slide of plans to “sunset” eight products and consolidate others.

Products on a list to be sunsetted–whatever that means–include MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious. Some of those properties came from acquisitions and others were internally generated.

The news of the Yahoo plans first came out via a screenshot of the Webcast posted on Twitter by Eric Marcoullier that included a slide with a list of impacted products next to an image of Irving, along with EVP of the Americas Ross Levinsohn, announcing the news.

Marcoullier was founder of MyBlogLog, which created one of the products being shut down. (MyBlogLog was bought by Yahoo in 2007 and has been pretty much neglected ever since.)

The slide also shows plans to merge additional products, including Fire Eagle and Yahoo People Search, and make features out of many others, including Yahoo! Alerts and Yahoo! Calendar. (If you have better eyes than I do, please help identify some of those logos in the comments.)

Marcoullier is no longer at Yahoo, although the validity of his Webcast screenshot was confirmed, after he was quickly criticized on Twitter by various current Yahoo employees who didn’t appreciate it getting out, including Irving himself, who insinuated he would fire whoever leaked the Webcast. (Click on image here to enlarge.)

While the layoffs and shutdowns obviously indicate a de-emphasis of technology products by Yahoo, they aren’t necessarily unwarranted. Some of these products were the same as those mentioned on then-SVP Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter Memo way back in 2006 as candidates for streamlining.

Update 12:21 p.m. PT: Yahoo’s statement on the matter just came through:

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.

In response to a follow-up question about Delicious, which seems to be the “sunsetted” product people are most upset about, the spokeswoman replied:

“We continue to operate Delicious today, and will communicate specific details when appropriate.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101216/following-layoffs-yahoo-cuts-products-mybloglog-delicious-yahoo-buzz/feed/ 28 http://allthingsd.com/20101124/joshua-schachter-goes-from-delicious-to-tasty/ http://allthingsd.com/20101124/joshua-schachter-goes-from-delicious-to-tasty/#comments Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:11:33 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26317 Joshua Schachter, who built social bookmarking site Delicious and sold it to Yahoo, has raised money for his next venture, which he’s calling…Tasty Labs. Get it?

Other than telling the world that Tasty Labs will put “the useful back into social software,” Schachter and his co-founders are being coy about what Tasty is up to. But they did announce today that they’ve taken an investment from Union Square Ventures, which backed Schachter’s first venture.

Schachter is a big deal in tech circles. That’s because Delicious was one of the first Web 2.0 start-ups to figure out the importance of social connections–it made it easy for you to tell other people what you were reading on the Web.

And it’s also because his company offers a cautionary tale about the perils of selling out too early, to the wrong place: After buying the company in late 2005, Yahoo essentially let it languish, and Schachter was vocal about his frustrations there.

Shachter left Yahoo in 2008, stopped by Google in 2009 and took off again this summer.

[Image credit: James Duncan Davidson]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101124/joshua-schachter-goes-from-delicious-to-tasty/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100827/meet-extensionfm-the-music-startup-google-should-buy/ http://allthingsd.com/20100827/meet-extensionfm-the-music-startup-google-should-buy/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:32:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=22920 You’re going to have to wait some time before you can use Google Music, because the service doesn’t exist yet. But if you want a sense of what it should look like, go play with ExtensionFM, an interesting start-up that plays off Google’s Chrome browser.

In a nutshell, ExtensionFM allows Chrome users to temporarily store, and play, most music they come across as they tour the Web. There’s an explanatory video at the bottom of this post, but the easiest thing to do is simply fire up Chrome, add the service to your browser and go surfing. You’ll be particularly happy if you visit MP3 blogs and Tumblrs.

The problem for Dan Kantor’s New York-based start-up is that, for the time being, it’s got a limited number of potential users. Chrome has less then 10 percent of the browser market, and only a subset of those users are comfortable with the idea of adding “extensions” in the first place.

Perhaps that’s why ExtensionFM has just 25,000 users after launching earlier this year–even after Google (GOOG) gave it a boost by featuring it at its I/O developer conference. But Kantor, who has put in time at various start-ups–most notably Delicious–as well as at Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) and AOL (AOL), says he plans to expand to other browsers–Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser just got a lot more extension friendly–and eventually the service will move onto mobile platforms, etc.

That’s the bet, at least. Kantor has raised a seed round from high-profile investors like Spark Capital and Betaworks, so they’re expecting this thing to move on from ultra-niche status eventually.

Or Google could just buy the thing outright and plug it into whatever it does launch, whenever that happens.

In the meantime, here’s a recent sit-down I had with Kantor:

And ExtensionFM’s own description of its service:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100827/meet-extensionfm-the-music-startup-google-should-buy/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100120/the-one-year-report-card-of-yahoo%e2%80%99s-carol-bartz-product-innovation-d-from-readers-a-from-sheila-and-c-from-boomtown/ http://allthingsd.com/20100120/the-one-year-report-card-of-yahoo%e2%80%99s-carol-bartz-product-innovation-d-from-readers-a-from-sheila-and-c-from-boomtown/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:05:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=23224

Yesterday, BoomTown asked a question on Twitter about what grade people thought I should give Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz for product innovation.

I began handing out marks to Bartz last week, after she gave herself a B- for overall performance for the year since she took over the troubled Internet giant.

But I decided to be more specific, splitting the grades for Yahoo (YHOO) in 2009 into five categories: Management, financials, product innovation, deal-making and moxie.

So far, I have given her an A- for management and a C+ for financials.

But I resorted to the lazy reporter trick of using Twitter, because I was torn when it comes to product innovation.

One main reason: Bartz inherited a company that has been suffering from a serious and chronic case of product constipation, after many years of leading the Web in new and innovative offerings.

In fact, from its amazing content products to its early attempts at personalization to its way-ahead-of-the-pack email to its cool design breakthroughs, Yahoo had always been the one to beat when it comes to the consumer Internet in Silicon Valley.

But that has decidedly not been the case for many years now, even as other key players have been very busy inventing some cool stuff.

Consider: Facebook with The Wall, News Feed, pokes and friending; Google (GOOG) with Chrome, Android and a plethora of major search innovations; Amazon (AMZN) with Kindle, Prime, EC2, S3; Twitter (the whole dang idea of it); and Apple (AAPL) with the iPod, the iPhone and, soon, the iPad–have you heard of them?

And–yes–even Microsoft has jumped in with a saucy new Bing search service in 2009, and it has been introducing features regularly, despite its weensie market share.

Product innovation also includes keeping a sharp eye out for new companies to snap up, and Yahoo used to do that, grabbing innovative start-ups, such as Flickr, Del.icio.us and many others.

But Yahoo made both of those purchases in 2005, and the entrepreneurs from those start-ups have since exited under a cloud.

In 2009, Yahoo made a few minor acquisitions, focusing instead on shedding and closing down former purchases it could not successfully integrate.

That kind of cleaning up is doubtlessly a good thing for Yahoo, and I did not think it completely fair to ding Bartz for a situation that obviously requires a lot of fixing, made even harder since there have been a lot of other issues to deal with at the company.

Nonetheless, as the year ticked on and other Web players marched ahead with all due speed into a range of new arenas, it has become increasingly worrisome to hear not a peep out of Yahoo or see any true spark of innovation, even as Bartz hired a passel of new execs, most of whom have more enterprise than consumer Internet experience.

While Yahoo did complete a significant overhaul of its homepage and launch a new marketing push, competitors such as AOL (AOL) and Microsoft did much the same.

As to the variety of key fixes across the site that should happen as a matter of course at any company, all of which were necessary–that’s great. But while Yahoo is in the midst of a brand revitalization, it simply does not get credit for keeping its existing properties properly updated.

Thus, my grade comes down to a C- in product innovation, since I cannot point to a single unique and striking innovation from Yahoo in 2009. Neither can I call its two very decent acquisitions–photo organization start-up Xoopit and Arab Internet portal Maktoob–game-changing in any way whatsoever.

My grade is better than the dozens of suggestions I got from readers in tweets, direct messages and emails, most of which rated Yahoo’s innovations effort of late at a D or D- grade (with one F–Hello, Keith R!).

Wrote one smart techie I know well, in a typical sentiment:

I’ll give them a D for product innovation. They have outsourced search to Microsoft. They made so many small, smart acquisitions over the years, but they killed them first and now looking to divest every one of them. They want to get into the social game, but have had Delicious, MyBlogLog, Upcoming for all these years and did nothing with it. They incubated Y! Pipes, same result.

And now their big game is social activity aggregation. They have the right assets–mail and messenger are still popular, news is still popular and they just renewed their deal with AP, users are still on Flickr, don’t agree with their home page strategy but with that and the Facebook Connect integration, Y! has the potential to know a lot about a user. They’d then be able sell targeted display ads for a premium, that Facebook has been (so far) reluctant to do. We’ll see how well they execute this year. I’m not very hopeful though. They have lost their product DNA.

We’ll have to see about that in 2010.

And, to be fair, Yahoo PR exec Sheila Tran respectfully disagreed with my assessment and sent me a cogent and well-argued email about how Yahoo did a lot better in this area than you might think, awarding it an A.

Here is her email in its entirety, so judge for yourself:

High-level Points

· Product innovation is not just about launching “new” products. We focused on continually innovating on our core/leading products/properties.
· Making these updates are key to our brand revitalization and core to our success moving forward.
· Other competitors may have updated some similar products this year but they don’t have the reach and leadership we have. Our updates in several areas such as the homepage, search, mail, mobile and messenger were differentiated from others.
· We have innovations that span across the consumer AND advertising experiences
· We’re focused on innovating globally ie launch of Meme

Product/Property

New Homepage

· In the US, we’ve seen a 12% year over year increase in UU’s on our homepage (Dec 08-09, comScore).
· The web is open and in 2009, Yahoo!’s homepage opened up, too. With the integration of the Yahoo! Application Platform and the new homepage (September 2009), we gave developers the ability to get in front of one of the largest daily audiences on the web.
· The new homepage takes the number of codebases from 33 to 1. The benefits of moving towards a single code base are many–faster time to market, less duplication of efforts, and a more robust technology platform to operate from, to name just a few.
· We expanded the use of our content optimization technology to the Today module, helping fill the page with more relevant and engaging content. While this isn’t always apparent to users, our content optimization algorithms work behind the scenes to help us fine-tune how we identify and display the most popular content. We are now testing how we can use the engine to help us personalize content to peoples’ interests–for example, if you’re a sports junkie we might increase the amount of sports news you see when you visit the Yahoo! homepage.

Mail
· Launch of open apps which is aligned with what we have done across the homepage and search.

Messenger
· Yahoo! Messenger has seen video instant messaging minute use grow 3x since its introduction last year.

Search
· Launch of SearchPad: online personal research assistance when people search. Only one that offers this
· Continued success with SearchMonkey and BOSS which resulted in a differentiated search experience on Yahoo! Search and outside of Yahoo!
. BOSS: more than 30 million queries a day
. SearchMonkey: live in more than 23 markets, more than 70 million enhanced searchmonkey results are viewed daily
· Launch of the new search results page: open apps, blended results, 3 column look and feel which google then announced, enhanced results with search monkey
· Launch of video and image search refiners: no other competitor has taken our approach which really provides a more relevant experiences for people.

Artist Pages
· Launch of the artist pages consumer experience that aggregates the best music products, services, information, and content the Web has to offer about more than 500,000 artists. Pulls together “best of the Web” music products such as iTunes, Amazon.com, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Pandora and others in one place.

Connected TV
· In 2009, Yahoo! revolutionized the TV experience by making the connection between TV viewing and the Internet a reality and signing distribution partnerships to embedding the Yahoo! Widget Engine directly in TVs from Samsung, Sony, LG and Vizio.
· In 2010, we continue to expand partner distribution globally (new partnerships with Hisense, MIPS, Viewsonic and Sigma), and move beyond the TV (into set top boxes, blu-ray players and more.) We also opened the WDK and introduced new Widgets providing users with thousands of content channels.

Mobile
· New Y! Mobile Homepage–33 countries across 1,900 devices; tighter PC to mobile synergies (http://m.yahoo.com)
. Over the past two years, we have seen the usage of our homepage more than triple – globally. (Yahoo! Internal Data)
· Adds voice search for iPhone and increases availability across other mobile devices
. Emerging markets are a key growth driver; for instance, in Indonesia we see nearly twice as many more mobile search users than we do on the PC. (Yahoo! Internal Data)
· iPhone / BlackBerry Apps for Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Flickr (iphone only, as there was already a BB app for Flickr)
· New Y! Mobile Homepage for US Hispanics
· Continue to sign strategic partnerships for leading mobile services, including Chunghwa Telecom and o2 Germany (mobile search, displacing Google)
. We have over 100 mobile operator and OEM partnerships around the world.

Advertising
· Rich Ads in Search: Most innovative way to bring display benefits to search and launched before any other search engine could have.
· Search Retargeting: Yahoo is the only media company that can leverage display and search effectively, as such Search Retargeting (uses a recent search query to serve up a relevant display ad) is something only we can do and do well.
· Innovative Strategy: Right Media going upstream. We have the largest ad exchange, in 2009 we decided to make it all about premium to have our exchange community be more appealing to big brands and publishers.

Acquisitions
· Xoopit–2008 Hack day winner. Brings phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo! Mail.
· Maktoob–Acquisition accelerates Yahoo!’s strategy of expanding in high-growth emerging markets where we believe Yahoo! has unparalleled opportunity to become the destination of choice for consumers.

[The C- photo is from Yahoo's still-terrific Flickr.]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100120/the-one-year-report-card-of-yahoo%e2%80%99s-carol-bartz-product-innovation-d-from-readers-a-from-sheila-and-c-from-boomtown/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090804/yahoo-bookmarking-site-delicious-freshens-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20090804/yahoo-bookmarking-site-delicious-freshens-up/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:46:16 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14022 Yahoo’s (YHOO) bookmarking service Delicious unveiled a redesign that highlights social features such as the ability to see which links other Web users are discussing the most.

Vik Singh, a software architect at Yahoo, said in a blog post that the changes are based on TweetNews, an application he developed that adds related tweets to recent Yahoo News articles.

“We thought about where else we could apply this model, and in short order selected a Yahoo property that we felt could benefit greatly from a social-freshness lift: the delicious homepage,” he said…

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090804/yahoo-bookmarking-site-delicious-freshens-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090319/furl-changes-hands/ http://allthingsd.com/20090319/furl-changes-hands/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:26:23 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=9626 This week Diigo acquired fellow social-bookmarking service Furl from LookSmart, a San Francisco online advertising company. Terms weren’t disclosed, but LookSmart said in a statement it would receive “a potential equity position” in Diigo in exchange for Furl.

LookSmart bought Furl in 2004, and while it reached one million users, it didn’t quite catch on like Delicious, which has five million users and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

LookSmart’s unloading of Furl isn’t the first consolidation made in the social bookmarking space this year. Yahoo (YHOO) recently closed down MyWeb in order to focus on Delicious, and Google (GOOG) just shuttered Shared Stuff.

Yesterday, as LookSmart discussed its earnings with analysts, CEO Ted West said the company faced several challenges with Furl. “We did see substantial commoditization of social bookmarking services and their availability across the web–commoditization in terms of numbers of providers,” he said.

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