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.
The Delicious plug-in makes it easier to add descriptive tags to bookmarks stored at the Delicious site.
(Credit: Yahoo)Investors and industry watchers may have their eyes on Yahoo's executive departures and coming reorganization, but for most people involved with Yahoo are just users of the company's technology.
Which is why it's interesting that Yahoo released a version of its Delicious plug-in for Internet Explorer on Thursday. (Download Delicious Internet Explorer extension 1.0 for Windows.)
The plug-in, which Yahoo released in beta form in May, makes it easier for people to use the Delicious "social bookmarking" site. Delicious lets people store Web page bookmarks on a central server, label them with a description and tags, and share them with others.
Delicious got its plug-in start with the open-source Firefox browser, but the site can be used by anyone with a browser without plug-ins. The Yahoo plug-in works with IE 6, IE 7 and should work with the IE 8 beta, but Yahoo isn't making any promises.
Yahoo now offers a beta version of its Delicious browser plug-in for online bookmarking functions.
(Credit: Yahoo)Delicious, Yahoo's "social bookmarking" site that lets people archive, tag, and share Web site addresses, got its start closely tied to the Firefox open-source Web browser (download Delicious for Firefox). Now Yahoo is branching out to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, too.
The company released a beta version of the IE plug-in Tuesday (available on Download.com). Though there are differences, the IE version is similar, offering users the ability to add and tag bookmarks and to search their own bookmark collection.
"We're very excited about this release, as we have many users who use Internet Explorer as their primary browser," said Nick Nguyen, senior product manager for Delicious, in a Delcious blog postint Tuesday.
The software works on IE 6, IE 7, and the IE 8 beta on Windows XP and Vista, Yahoo said.
Well, it took a few months, but Yahoo on Wednesday caught up to Firefox 3 with a beta plug-in for its Delicious bookmarking service.
The Firefox add-on for Delicious "now has full Firefox 3 support while retaining Firefox 2 compatibility," said Nick Nguyen, senior product manager for Delicious, in a blog posting.
Delicious lets people save their bookmarks online, tag them with descriptive keywords, and share them with other Delicious members.
It's only one plug-in, I know, but since I'd griped about its absence before, it's only fair for me to call out its availability for download now.
Firefox has a wealth of plug-ins to extend its abilities, but several don't work on Firefox 3, which is still in beta. Delicious is one very widely used tool, so the new plug-in should help lower barriers significantly.
The new plug-in also has a handful of features. None struck me as major, though the low-profile "classic mode" sounds promising; check the blog for a list.
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