Excellent! This is one happy merger in my view. As of today, social bookmarking and tagging site del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo! suite of services. As Barb Dybwad notes on our Social Software blog, maybe an integrated bookmarklet will enable tagging a site to both del.icio.us and Yahoo!'s in-house social bookmarking service My Web 2.0. When My Web 2.0 was launched, my del.icio.us use plummeted. Yahoo! took the tagging idea and ran with it, providing a much friendlier and more richly communal experience than del.cio.us, in my opinion. But del.icio.us is still a must-visit site, part of the My Web/del.icio.us/Digg trio that fuels content for the "yesterday is old news" crowd. I am rubbing my hands together, looking forward to how Yahoo! might mash its two properties together.

Then, there is Flickr, Yahoo!'s other great tag-centric service. Jeremy Zawodny, writing on the Yahoo! search blog, says: "...the del.icio.us team will soon be working in close proximity to their fraternal twin, Flickr. And just like we've done with Flickr, we plan to give del.icio.us the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community. Finally, don't be surprised if you see My Web and del.icio.us borrow a few ideas from each other in the future." It's all good.