YouTube founders focus on link sharing

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.

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,” said Hurley, “is try to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world.”

Created in 2003, Delicious lets people save links from around the web and organise 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, Chen and 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,” 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.”

©2011 The New York
Times News Service