TechCrunch reports that Delicious 2.0 has been delayed, Joshua Schachter has left the project and may leave the company. This is a disaster for Yahoo.
To me Schachter is as important to search as Larry Page. If anyone ever wonders how Google would have ended up if Yahoo had bought for $1m when it had the chance take one look at delicious. The insight a its heart – that links between users can give you a totally different type of search algorithm – is just as ground breaking as PageRank when it came along.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think a reformed Delicious is a Google killer but it has the potential to be a genuine search competitor in a way no other current large competitor does. If Yahoo management had any clue they would make Schachter CTO, put him back on Delicious and build the company around it.
[...] this catastrophe is anyone’s guess. Yahoo search will never threaten them unless they put Schachter in charge of it which nobody at Yahoo has the imagination [...]
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