Yahoo.icio.us? – Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us

I just got off an instant message conversation with Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us. I was asking him for any comment on the Yahoo acquisition rumors and he pointed me to the del.icio.us blog.

Yahoo has acquired Del.icio.us, which has approximately 300,000 users:

y.ah.oo!

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way – our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.

I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!

Competition is such a wonderful thing. Yahoo, in addition to launching a flurry of new products in the last few months (and the pace seems to be accelerating), now owns the two most important tagging properties on the web – flickr and del.icio.us.

Congratulations, Del.icio.us. And Fred Wilson. And Josh Kopelman.

UPDATE: Jeremy Zawodny posts on the Yahoo Search Blog announcing the acquisition as well. “And as of today, del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo! family.”