Can YouTube’s Masterminds Make Bookmarks Delicious Again?

Somehow I missed the news in May that Yahoo had sold the Delicious brand to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. After Sunday’s New York Times article on their plans for the once-preeminent online bookmarking service, I’m positively stoked.

When the men heard about Yahoo’s plans to close Delicious, their ears perked up, and they placed a personal call to Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo, and made him an offer. (They declined to disclose financial details of the transaction.)

At heart, they say, the revamped service will still resemble the original Delicious when it opens to the public, which Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley said would happen later this year.  But their blueprint involves an overhaul of the site’s design and the software and the systems used to tag and organize links.

Sounds like Delicious is in good hands. The site is in dire need of an update, and a complete overhaul of the front and backend will help exorcise the demons of Yahoo’s five years of neglect. This owner switch should also allow Delicious to build a front page with video, audio, and image suggestions baked in, hopefully utilizing an HTML5 structure.

The question, as the author of The New York Times article says, is whether users need another sharing site in the first place. I’ve already found myself forgetting to check in to Google Plus, not because the service is bad (quite the opposite), but because so far I’ve found it unnecessary. Can Delicious overcome that perception and give people a unique enough experience to make it in what is arguably an already over-saturated market? Will it work with Facebook instead of competing with Facebook, perhaps?

I’m holding out hope for Delicious. For one thing, I could use a way to sift through the flotsam in my Facebook and Google Plus feeds.

For another, and maybe this is just me, but that Delicious logo is too good to go to waste. I look forward to the day when you’ll see (and use!) that blue box at the bottom of a Techcitement article.

(Until then, how about liking this article on Facebook?)