Yahoo said today that it isn’t killing its Delicious social-bookmarking service after all, as some suspected it might when it was included on a list of Yahoo assets marked for “sunsetting” late last year. Instead Yahoo is selling the service to Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, two of the co-founders of YouTube. Although the new buyers say they are planning to maintain the service as is, it also sounds like they have something much bigger in mind — and they obviously know a thing or two about building a small service into a major web property. So what could Delicious become? The key to answering that question is information discovery, one of the meatiest problems in media right now.

In a statement about the acquisition, Hurley and Chen’s new company (known as AVOS) hinted at this future by saying that their plan is to “build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information-discovery service on the web.” The company also said that it wants to solve the problem of information overload, which is a problem “not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” according to Chen. Hurley left YouTube last October, and Chen left in 2009.

So how could a bookmark-sharing service — which never really cracked the mainstream web-user market when it was a standalone business run by founder Josh Schachter, and didn’t come any closer to big time adoption after its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005 — solve that problem? The answer lies in how we consume information now, and how that is changing. One of the biggest changes is the social nature of content; how we share it and also discover it via social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and the increasing amounts of content coming not just from those networks but from apps and services like Instagram.

In many ways, services such as Instapaper and Evernote and Twitter’s favorite feature have taken over the space where Delicious used to be a player: they are all ways of keeping track of those web links and photos and other bits of data that we don’t want to lose as the real-time information stream flows past us at a hundred miles an hour. But they are disconnected from each other — my Instapaper doesn’t know that I favorited something on Twitter, and vice versa. Evernote is close to being a “backup brain” in that sense, but there is still plenty of room to solve that problem of tracking what we have read and shared, and helping us make sense of it. This also arguably something that Google should have — or could have — done using its RSS reader as a foundation, but hasn’t.

And so far, even the existing players have only started to scratch the surface of what they could do in terms of information discovery and smart recommendation, which I have argued in the past is the Holy Grail of media. Instapaper has added features that let you share with others, and see what your friends have shared, and that’s a step in the direction of discovery; so is News.me letting you look over the shoulder of others as they read, and Zite’s explicit recommendations.

But think about the vast amount of content that has already been sucked in by Delicious over the years — arguably the single biggest asset that the company has, and the one Hurley and Chen were likely willing to pay up for. Those millions of shared bookmarks are a kind of social graph of content in a way: they are implicit signals from all the people who shared those links, or stored them for later, that there is valuable content there. Some of those links may be dead or changed, but it’s still a fairly substantial foundation for an information-discovery service to build on.

Search Engine Land says that Hurley and Chen might be trying to take on Google, and in a sense they are: the way we find information is changing, and Google is trying to catch up to those changes too. It’s mostly failing so far. The new kings of social information discovery are Twitter and Facebook — and the Delicious acquisition is a sign that YouTube’s former founders would like to join that race.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user retinafunk

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight

---

alt='Join Gameloft’s new studio!'
border='0' width='300' height='250'
/>

GigaOM

The first simple thing you could do is power off the computer each week. When you do this, the computer will do a fast cleanup on each powerdown. Also, once you start to see a slow down of the PC, we would recommend defragmenting the computer. It is not as hard as it sounds. To defragment a computer, here’s what to do:

Start menu >>>
All Programs >>>
Accessories >>>
System Tools >>>
Disk Defragmenter

When the defragmenter window comes up, you can press the ‘Defragment’ button, and let it get to work! According to this Naperville computer repair technician, this is 1 of the greatest methods to fix a slow computer. When this step is complete, there are a few more tips for you to try to speed up a PC.

You might not possess ample hard disk drive space. Verify that there is at minimum 200-500MB of free hard disk drive space. This available room allows your computer to have room for the swap file to increase in size and also room for temporary files. You may delete the temporary internet files by completing the following steps:

1. Bring up internet explorer
2. Click on ‘Tools’ and then scroll down to Internet Options
3. You’ll now see a Delete cookies & Delete files button.
4. Click on each one & delete them by hitting ‘OK’. Also type c:WindowsTemporary Internet Files into the address bar & delete anything that may be in this directory.
5. After that, go to ‘Run’ that is located under the start menu, and type in ‘%temp%’. Delete all that is in this folder too. Next, delete the recycling bin by right clicking on it & scrolling down to Empty Recycling Bin. The Naperville computer repair technician says this will quicken up the computer big time.

Next you have to look for malware. Currently, spyware and other malware is a huge cause of a lot of computer problems including a slow computer. Even if an anti-virus scanner is installed on the computer we recommend completing a malware scan on the computer.