Delicious (stylized del.icio.us) was an early bookmarking website that allowed users to save websites they visited to lists that could also be shared. These lists could then be shared among other users. Delicious pioneered the term “social bookmarking” and its system of letting users tag URLs they saved with tags was unique at the time.
Delicious launched in 2003, and by 2004 several similar services Furl, Simpy, Spurl.net had started.
Delicious was created by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov and launched in 2003. Yahoo bought Delicious in 2005 for between $15-$30 million, according to Schachter.
The book Founders at Work includes a chapter on how Delicious came to be.
By the end of 2008, Delicious claimed to have more than 5.3 million users with 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. In 2011 Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems, and it was gradually passed around to first Science Inc then to Delicious Media, and finally, Pinboard acquired them in 2017. Pinboard, themselves an early Delicious alternative, gradually closed in the site in the months that followed. As of 2020, the del.icio.us website is inactive.