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YouTube founders ready for ‘Delicious’ next act

The creators of the world’s most popular video site acquired Delicious from Yahoo Inc., which decided late last year to either close or sell the service. The financial terms of the deal announced Wednesday weren’t disclosed.

Delicious will become part of Avos, an Internet startup that Hurley and Chen, a Hersey High School graduate, have set up near the San Mateo office where they started YouTube in 2005. They sold YouTube to Google Inc. for $1.76 billion in 2006.

Avos says it is working on ways to help people navigate the torrent of information cascading from Internet services. How it intends to do that is a mystery. Avos didn’t respond to requests for an interview.

“We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” Chen said in a statement.

Delicious apparently will evolve into something slightly different as Avos pursues its mission.

“We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web,” Hurley said in a statement.

Delicious, started in 2003, provides a forum for sharing Web bookmarks to “tasty” information. The service will remain in its current form until July, according to information posted Wednesday on Delicious’ website. There were no further details on how it might change after that.

As he was at YouTube, Hurley is CEO at Avos. He stepped down as YouTube’s CEO last fall and had been focusing on a men’s clothing line called Hlaska.

Chen, formerly YouTube’s chief technology officer, left YouTube in 2008.

Hurley and Chen met each other while they were working at PayPal, an online payment service now owned by eBay. YouTube’s sale to Google made them both wealthy. Hurley received 735,000 shares of Google stock that were worth about $350 million when the deal closed in November 2006. Chen got 625,000 Google shares worth about $300 million at that time.

Yahoo bought Delicious in 2005. The deal didn’t work out the way Delicious founder Joshua Schachter envisioned, and he left the company in 2008.

Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., decided to discard Delicious as part of a cost-cutting strategy adopted by CEO Carol Bartz. The trimming has helped boost Yahoo’s earnings, but revenue remains in a funk more than two years after the company hired Bartz to engineer a turnaround.