Delicious lives on! Sold to YouTube Founders

Remember the big controversy last year about Yahoo! planning to shut off popular bookmarking site Delicious? That chapter has finally closed and users of the service can breathe a massive sigh of relief as Delicious will live on. Yahoo! has thankfully found it a new home after months of searching for the right buyer (probably powered by Bing). Yahoo! is handing over Delicious to the hands of YouTube's founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

The pair has purchased Delicious for an undisclosed sum and created a new company called AVOS which will fully take over the site beginning some time in July 2011. They plan to obviously continue the service but also said that they want to turn the site even better by working with the community to improve many of its features and make the service a lot easier and more fun to use.

Many of Delicious' members have moved to other services such as Pinboard (and poured money on Pinboard's ecstatic founder) but many more have not. For those who remain on Delicious, it will ask members to log in and to agree on the transfer of database from Yahoo! to AVOS. Just about every piece of data that Yahoo! currently stores on behalf of Delicious' users will be handed over to AVOS. To read more about the transition, Delicious has provided a FAQ list.

Members of Delicious are expected to keep using the service as usual during the transition period. Those who have long since forgotten their username or password, however, might want to dig up their keychain or visit the site's password reset page if they want to maintain their data on Delicious. Those who do not agree to the transfer of data by the end of the transition will have their accounts permanently locked.

For the next several weeks, Yahoo! will keep managing the site as Delicious begins the transition to its new owners. How the new site will look or what new features and services it will offer remain to be seen for now but it's likely that  Delicious will not see significant, if any, changes, at least until the transition is complete.