Shortly after igniting the fury of Delicious users everywhere, Yahoo tried to calm everyone by claiming it would be selling the popular bookmarking site instead of shutting it down. Unfortunately, interested buyers seem to be scarce.
TechCrunch claims that parties considering buying Delicious reported that Yahoo has been unresponsive. The site also says that, according to one of the “five companies and venture firms that have reached out to Yahoo,” the company is looking to start promoting the sale in a couple of weeks. Apparently, most of these buyers would offer deals in the “sub-$5 million range.”
And there are more problems. Former product manager Stephen Hood blogged that there is the issue of reworking Delicious to function on a platform other than Yahoo. “During my time at Delicious we rebuilt the entire infrastructure to deeply leverage a number of internal Yahoo technologies. It’s all great stuff but not exactly easy to remove or replace.” Not quite a ringing endorsement for potential buyers out there.
A former Yahoo and Delicious employee recently told Mashable this is part of the reason he isn’t sure the site is going to survive intact. The insider agrees with Hood’s concerns about the site’s infrastructure being too deeply integrated with Yahoo, and that perhaps the best case scenario will be for Delicious’ data to be archived somewhere – Hood suggested the Library of Congress as the information’s future home in his blog.
But if Yahoo is truly waiting until mid January to begin seriously looking at buyers, then there is still hope for Delicious to live on at least somewhat unscathed.
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