Delicious founder leaves Yahoo

Joshua Schachter, the founder of the Delicious social-bookmarking service Yahoo acquired in 2005, is joining the executive exodus from the Internet giant.

"Just time to move on, I think," Schachter said in an e-mail, but didn't share further details.

The Internet company also confirmed on Thursday evening that Schachter will leave at the end of June; TechCrunch reported it earlier.

"Joshua Schachter has contributed greatly to Delicious' success and Yahoo's success in our social search efforts...Yahoo wishes him well in his next endeavor," the company said in a statement.

Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

He's one of an ever-longer list of recent Yahoo departures, which also includes the following just from recent days:

Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of the network division; Qi Lu, executive vice president of engineering for search and advertising technology; Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions; Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications and community; Vish Makhijani, senior vice president of search; Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of Flickr; Jeremy Zawodny, an open-source developer and evangelist of what's now become the Yahoo Open Strategy; and Jason Zajac, who has been general manager of social media, head of finance for the audience division, and vice president of corporate strategy.

Yahoo believes there are plenty other folks to keep Delicious healthy: "His departure leaves behind a seasoned team that will take Delicious to the next level, as well as carry forward the mission of Delicious to continue to be the shared memory of the web and the world's largest social bookmarking site."

Delicious (aka del.icio.us) lets people save Web site bookmarks on a central server, adding tags and text to describe them. People also can subscribe to feeds showing others' bookmark activity, whence the term social bookmarking.

Schachter started the project in response to challenges he encountered sharing bookmarks at the Memepool site he helped found and run.

Yahoo released a delicious plug-in for Internet Explorer on Thursday, but it's had a Firefox plug-in for years and can be used with a more ordinary browser interface, too.

[rahodeb]

See his comment here - he says he was sidelined at Yahoo and found the experience "incredibly frustrating":

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/19/it-gets-worse-for-yahoo-delicious-founder-leaving/#comment-2381050

[gerrrg]

O Hoya, does this signal the beginning of the end of the good times? Oh Yao, the team is disintegrating! Ooh ya, this reminds me of Digital! Ohayo Google!

[wango2007]

Yahoo is doomed. The financial powers that be will soon be tako the company away from Yang because of the way he has mishandled things.

[tyneham]

Are deck-chairs re-arranged on sinking, stinking ships? Read link save Yahoo related factual news feature, entitled: "Yahoo protects online fraudsters, locks out legal ethical experts," at http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29113, http://tyneham.blogspot.com, http://tyneham.newsvine.com