This past April YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen acquired link-sharing service Delicious.com from Yahoo! The two are prepared to launch a new version of Delicious.com later this year. Delicious is one of the most popular bookmarking services today. Delicious allows people to save and bookmark links from the Internet for future reference and organizing them using tags. Personally I am not a fan of Delicious as I like Google Bookmarks better.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has sold off Delicious (formerly known as Del.icio.us) to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Hurley and Chen will continue to operate Delicious as it is for the next couple of months as users will be able to sign up for new accounts. The parent company of Delicious will now be AVOS, a company that was started by Hurley and Chen. Below is a press release about the transaction. [Yodel Anecdotal]

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) is considering selling Delicious for between $1-$2 million according to a BusinessInsider source. It is uncertain which company is buying Delicious, but the source knows it is a “strategic partner.” Some potential partners may include Digg or StumbleUpon. The reason why it is taking a while to spin off Delicious is because the bookmarking website depends entirely on Yahoo!’s technology. Delicious currently does not have a revenue model, but it has a very loyal community.

Google has recently announced a way to import your Yahoo! Delicious bookmarks into their own bookmarking service. When you go to google.com/bookmarks and click on the “Import Delicious Bookmarks,” you are asked to log in using your Yahoo! or Delicious account credentials. It imports all of your bookmarks with all of the tags associated with them. Google Bookmarks launched in 2005 and is a very popular service. Yahoo! has indicated recently that they want to spin-off Delicious, possibly to Kevin Rose and the Digg team.

On the Diggnation podcast, Digg founder Kevin Rose revealed that he had talks with Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) about taking over Delicious. This was before an internal memo leaked where Yahoo! said they are planning to sunset Delicious.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has made it clear that they are not shutting down Delicious, but they are interested in spinning them off or selling it. Because of this recently developed news about Delicious, users have been actively finding ways to import their bookmarks into other services. Springpad is now offering a seamless solution for importing your Delicious bookmarks. Here is how to do it.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) did a terrible job integrating social bookmarking service Delicious into their own eco-system. Five years later the company is now talking about spinning the company off.

A rumor spread around yesterday that Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) was going to shut down Delicious, but they are seriously considering spinning them off instead. “While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive,” said Delicious in a blog post. Some people are worried about all of the data that they have stored in Delicious. Delicious said not to worry about exporting anything. There are some export options if you choose to take your data out.