Yahoo Buys Del.icio.us

This just in: Yahoo bought del.icio.us.

[del.icio.us is]... 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!)

I don't know what Yahoo plans to do with del.icio.us. I just hope they won't ruin it. I had similar concerns about Flickr in a previous post in March, but so far, my fears have been unfounded.

If you are unfamiliar with delicious, it is an online bookmarking service. You can access your bookmarks from anywhere. But that's not the cool part. The cool part is that you can see everybody's bookmarks and you can see what is getting bookmarked right now. The insider term for this kind of service is a "social bookmarking" service. I just like the way you can search, sift and click around to get an handle on what people think is important right now by looking at their bookmarks.

Like Flickr, Delicious is a small-time operation, with no revenue model, tons of users, and open APIs. It is a curious purchase for Yahoo and seems to run contrary to their top-down, advertising-driven business. They must see something in these services that remind them of their own early days. See Yahoo, circa October 17, 1996.

Alexadex - The Web Site Trading Game

I am always keeping an eye on the latest cool applications built on the Alexa Web Information Service. The latest and perhaps most fun of the bunch is Alexadex. Built by a former Alexa employee, this site is pure fun. It allows anybody to buy and sell Web sites with the price pegged at the weekly reach of the site.

Alexa had an employee, Eliot Savarese, who worked in QA about 5 years ago and he never tired of telling me about his idea for a Web site trading game based on Alexa data. I never took him seriously. We simply didn't have the resources to justify building a game when so much work was needed on the Alexa toolbar and on the Web site. I don't know if he's seen Alexadex yet, but I'm sure he'll be wanting to kick me right about now. But this is the beauty of the Alexa Web Information Service. Alexa doesn't have to build the game... andybody can, and somebody has.

Alexadex is strictly a one-man, part-time operation, built in fits and starts over the last month or so. You start the game with a fictional account filled with $10 grand. You can use it to purchase sites with prices pegged at the weekly reach number for a given site. If the site goes up you begin to make money. If it goes down you lose money. It now features graphs, movers and shakers and top traders. There are now hundreds of active traders, all trying to pick the next hot site.

Alexadex can get pretty addictive, especially if you consider yourself to be a Web "expert." The trick is to try to pick sites that are getting heavier-than-usual traffic today and buy them today, to take advantage of their Alexa reach stats tomorrow. I had an amazing run of luck when I first played the game and eventually had millions of dollars, unfortunately, all fictional. But it didn't stop me from fantasizing that I had some latent talent that was going to make me fabulously rich.

Are you an E-prognosticator? Do you know the next big thing online? Prove it: Alexadex.

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