Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, YouTube founders and new owners of Delicious, are planning a complete revamp of the site in the upcoming months with high hopes of staking its ground in the highly competive world of bookmarks and shares. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, then sold to Chad Hurley and Steve Chen'scompany AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011for an undisclosed amount.
It has maintained a faithful technorati crowd but has failed to attract a wider population. Hurley and Chen, are expecting to appeal to a wider crowd with the launch of a new design, software and systems to tag and organize bookmarks.
The current home page of Delicious features the most recent pages bookmarked by its users, and is widely dominated by technology news, reflecting its current and faithful users' interests. The new Delicious, according to a New York Times article, " aims to be more of a destination, a place where users can go to see the most recent links shared around topical events", as well as the latest, gadget reviews and tech tips, based on popularity and followers. Delicious attracts around half a million visitors a month, according to comScore.
Delicious is not the only bookmarking site hoping to gain new ground.
Digg launched in 2004 was once considered the most popular bookmarking site but lost ground the last two years caused mainly by its inability to cope with its own popularity, resulting in a slow loading site, the poor quality and high quantity of articles submitted, and a corrupted voting system, making it near impossible to be featured on the front page for anyone without thousands of followers. Responding to criticism and plummeting numbers, it launched Digg V4 in the spring of 2010. Digg V4 introduced a personalized news stream, and a more up-to-date look but it failed to recapture its previous popularity. But a Digg V5 is planned for the next months, with an open- call for beta testers on its homepage.
Digg - received $40m of venture capital in its lifetime. It holds its ground with 40 million monthly visitors.
