First YouTube, Now Delicious. The Masters Behind YouTube Are at it Again

[caption id="attachment_3096" align="alignleft" width="314" caption="Chad Hurley & Steve Chen"][/caption]

Steve Chen and Chad Hurley: two names you maybe have never heard of. They were the guys who created the website sensation YouTube, and then sold it to Google for $1.65 billion. Being no stranger to transforming a website into internet gold, the YouTube boys are at it again, this time on a website that was once on the rise but fell short. They have a new partner and financier...Yahoo.

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have some experience with turning a small Web site into Internet gold. In 2006 they sold their scrappy start-up YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion.

The Delicious office in San Mateo, Calif. It now has around 15 employees, mostly engineers.

More recently they picked an unlikely candidate to be their next Web sensation: a Yahoo castoff.

The men are trying to inject new life into Delicious, a social bookmarking service that, in its time, was popular among the technorati, but failed to catch on with a broader audience.

“What we plan to do,” Mr. Hurley said in an interview here last week, “is try to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world.”

Created in 2003, Delicious lets people save links from around the Web and organize them using a simple tagging system, assigning keywords like “neuroscience” or “recipes.” It was praised for the way it allowed easy sharing of those topical links. The site’s early popularity spurred Yahoo to snap it up in 2005 — but in the years after that Yahoo did little with it.

In December, leaked internal reports from Yahoo hinted that the company was planning to sell or shut down the service.

At the same time, Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, who had recently formed a new company called Avos and begun renting space a few blocks from the original YouTube offices in San Mateo, had been brainstorming ideas for their next venture. One problem they kept circling around was the struggle to keep from drowning in the flood of news, cool new sites and videos surging through their Twitter accounts and RSS feeds, a glut that makes it difficult to digest more than a sliver of that material in a given day.

“Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day,” Mr. Chen said. “There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on.”

He added, “There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.”

Read more at The New York Times