Yahoo! continues to develop its online community strategy by buying bookmarking service del.icio.us.

Given the rivalry between Google and Yahoo! it is easy to forget how different the two companies are.

Yahoo! has for a long time been a portal company, i.e. a company aiming at building so much content that “sensible” surfers would stay at the yahoo.com, venturing only onto the rest of the web when looking for more seedy forms of entertainment.

Google on the other hand has been a search technology company, run by engineers wanting to help people explore the rest of the web.

Admittedly the distinction is starting to blur. Google has seen the benefits of having surfers using their services, letting them serve more revenue generating text ads. Hence Google’s rush to add more and more sites and services to its toolbox. Still, at the core Google remains primarily a search provider.

Yahoo! has realized that the best way of generating content is to let the users write it for you.

This is why they launched a special answer service this week. Unlike Google’s answer service Yahoo’s one is run by regular visitors, not experts, turning it into a sort of online community.

This is also why Yahoo! bought Flickr, an online community for sharing photos.

In the same way, Yahoo! has now acquired del.icio.us, an online service for sharing bookmarks.

At Delicious you can, in the words of the service:

• “Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someones favorite - they’ve already done the work of finding it.”

Hence, the purpose of is twofold:

1. It lets the user collect bookmarks online, making them available from any computer worldwide. If you are using several computers and browsers this is a great advantage.

2. Given that users are asked to tag the bookmarks the system generates a huge database of people’s favorites sorted according to topics.

For instance: If you go to the site and search for the term “search engine”, del.icio.us will give you a list of bookmarked sites of relevance to this topic.

Hence it may be used as a kind of directory, directing you to sites people has found so interesting that they have added them to their favorites.

For Yahoo! the service has another benefit: It provides a system of quality control. A bookmark is a vote of confidence, signifying quality and relevance.

If Yahoo! can control the spammers, the company may even use these “favorites” in their search engine algorithm, giving a boost to sites bookmarked by many. Whether they will actually do this remains to be seen.

There are more bookmarking services out there. Will Google buy de.lirio.us?

Announcement of the takeover at the del.icio.us blog.
The Intuitive Life Business Blog, interview with experts using del.icio.us. (Intuitive Systems)