Yahoo! sells Delicious to YouTube founders

Yahoo! on Wednesday sold Delicious to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who promised to continue and grow the popular social bookmarking site.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Hurley and Chen, who sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, said they planned to integrate Delicious with their new San Mateo, California-based Internet company AVOS.

"We're excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level," AVOS chief executive Hurley said in a statement.

"We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web," Hurley said.

The YouTube co-founders said they would seek to use Delicious 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," Chen said.

Yahoo! said it will continue to operate Delicious until July, when users will transitioned over to AVOS.

Yahoo! said the sale of Delicious was part of a product strategy that "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," Yahoo! said.

Delicious, which has millions of users around the world, was launched in 2003 and bought by Yahoo! in 2005.