Delicious was sold to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen making it part of their new company AVOS.

Delicious is a social bookmarking service started in 2003 and sold to Yahoo! in 2005. Initially Delicious was considered one of the most valuable assets in expanding Yahoo! activities but not everyone was convinced of the company’s business strategy.

In 2006 Brad Garlinghouse, a vice-president of Yahoo! research division, published an open criticism to his company, accused of over-expanding to turn from a search engine into a portal offering services of all kinds.

Maybe there was something in it or not everything worked as expected because the founders of Flickr, another of the services acquired by Yahoo!, left the company in 2006. In 2008 Garlinghouse himself resigned, just like Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, who said he regretted selling his creature.

The decline of Yahoo! occurred in recent years is well known, including the attempts to purchase it by Microsoft that didn’t go through until the agreement reached last summer with Bill Gates’ company with which Yahoo! ceased to be an autonomous search engine to use instead Bing for searches.

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Yahoo! was seeking a buyer for Delicious so last December the staff was laid-off and a deadline was established for this July with the intention to terminate the service if nobody had bought it.

Now YouTube founders have stepped forward and bought Delicious with the intention to resume its development. For example they have immediately promised an extension compatible with Firefox 4.

What’s going to happen for Delicious users? It was announced that the service will continue to operate as now until July 2011, then it will be transferred. All users have received an email in which the change of ownership was announced and they’re asked to authorize their account transfer at the end of the transition period.

It would be interesting to know how many people actually keep on using Delicious and how many accounts are “dead”. Personally I must say that entering the site to allow my data’s migration I realized that among my bookmarks there were some sites that no longer exist.

It will be interesting to see if AVOS succeds in revitalizing the Delicious brand. Good luck!