Choi+J.+Strategy+Report

Choi J. TO: Proximity Social Networking team FROM: Jungwook Choi DATE: March 1, 2010 SUBJECT: Strategy Report on "Delicious.com"

We were asked to create a strategy report for a social networking site. Here is my report on Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking services (eBizMBA, 2010). Delicious does not dominate social networking markets yet. Whether Gen-Y users will choose it as their primary place for social networking, substantially, depends on its strategies and contents for Gen-Y users.

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! Inc. on December 2005. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California (Wikipedia, 2010) .It has more than five million registered users and 150 million bookmarked URLs (Tech Crunch, 2009).
 * Profile**

Things we can do with Delicious: 1. Bookmark any site on the Internet, and access it from any computer 2. Share our bookmarks, and get bookmarks in return 3. Discover the most useful and interesting bookmarks on the web

Delicious (delicious.com) and Digg (digg.com) are most popular and dominant in the market of social sharing web services. Since Yahoo acquired Delicious in 2005, in particular, it has constantly been pouring more resources into Delicious to make it more successful and popular. Therefore, Delicious has rapidly been developed as a dominant social bookmarking site (Rocha 2008). It has an extremely active and loyal group of users (Cashmore 2009).
 * Competitive landscape**

Their success has motivated an estimated 40 competitors including foreign websites to challenge the new field of social networking markets. Some of the competitors, e.g. Blink List (blinklist.com) and Faves (faves.com), reflect the model of Delicious into their own service in order to offer a social bookmarking web service (Kaufman 2009). This circumstance should be more competitive and tougher to survive and to win the field of a social networking. -is this necessary?


 * Strategy**

Delicious has a powerful bookmarking tool. The site lets users store their bookmarks on the internet rather than on their computer’s web browser. Therefore, they can get their own bookmarks from any computer. In addition, a new designed website makes it easier to read and use at a glance by providing bigger spacing between links and keeping the bookmark's tag separate from the rest of the information (Mandell 2008).

Delicious has made a simple online bookmarking more social and more interactive (Website Review). All users can share their bookmarks with whoever they want because the bookmarks are available to everyone else on the site unless they choose to make them private.

One of the biggest problems of social bookmarking service is the lack of a real-time relevancy in focusing on Gen-Y as primary targeted users. Because Yahoo has integrated Delicious with Twitter, however, it has satisfied their desire by letting users tweet their bookmarks on Twitter (Ziff Davis Media, 2009).
 * Gen-Y implications**

Another big problem of social bookmarking service is how fast and easy users find and explore the freshest bookmarks and the best proper sources.To solve the problem, it has added better search tools to make it easier that users find bookmarks even though its search engine does not work as comprehensive or reliable as some major search engines, e.g. Google or Yahoo. (Ziff Davis Media, 2009)


 * References**

Arrington, Michael. (2009, September 6). Exclusive: Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 Preview. Techcrunch TECH. Retrieved Feb. 20, 2010, from __ [] .__ Cashmore, Pete. (2009, February 15). Yahoo MyWeb Shuts Down, Becomes Delicious. Newstex Web. Retrieved Feb. 23, 2010, from Lexis/Nexis Academic Database.

eBizMBA. (2010, February). Top 20 Most Popular Social Bookmarking Websites. Retrieved Feb. 20, 2010, from __ [] .__

Kaufman, Dan. (2009, March 23). Spread the news; Icon feature. Sydney Morning Herald, THE GUIDE. Retrieved Feb. 20, 2010, from Lexis/Nexis Academic Database.

Mandell, Josh. (2008, August 12). Website Review: The New Delicious.com. Blogcritics.org Science and Technology. Retrieved Feb. 20, 2010, from Lexis/Nexis Academic Database.

Rocha, Roberto. (2008, September 16). Yahoo's identity crisis. The Gazette, BUSINESS; Pg. B3. Retrieved Feb. 23, 2010, from Lexis/Nexis Academic Database.

Ziff Davis Media Inc. (2009, August 4). Yahoos Delicious Goes Realtime With Twitter Advanced Search. eWeek.com. Retrieved Feb. 21, 2010, from Lexis/Nexis Academic Database.