Bookmarking Service

Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Leaves Google —

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Esse título do post ficou gay, hein? :-)

Over a year after joining Google, Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious and a Yahoo exec until June 2008, is leaving the search giant, according to a Tweet he just sent out. Schachter sent out another Tweet shortly after the first message stating that he has “no clue what he’s doing next.” Schachter confirmed to us that he is in fact leaving Google.

When asked why he was leaving Google, Schachter told us that he “Felt like doing something new,” but apparently doesn’t know what that new project is. Yet. Schachter joined Google last January as an engineer and also continued his role as an independent angel investor. He tells us that he may slow down his investments in this next stage of his career.

Schachter of course is best known for founding bookmarking service Delicious, which was acquired by Yahoo in December of 2005. Schachter has been fairly vocal about his displeasure with the direction of Delicious and even launched his own threaded Twitter conversation application last Summer while at Google.

Schachter’s angel investments include Foursquare, SimpleGEO, Square, DailyBooth, Bump Technologies and most recently BlockChalk and 4chan founder Moot’s new startup Canvas Networks.

Following a rebranding last year, Xmarks, a social bookmarking and search tool, has been growing steadily in users. Following the addition of its search feature last March, Xmarks now has 4.5 million active users and has bookmarked 1 billion URLS. Xmarks is free as a plug-in to users (and is available on IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari) but until now, has not turned on any revenue streams. Today, the bookmarking service is launching its first monetization channel, called SearchBoost, which is designed to increase click-thru rates on search ads and provide deeper analytics to participating advertisers.

So Xmarks aggregates and analyzes over a billion bookmarks to create web site ratings and reviews via on its platform. Reviews are added by Xmarks users, at a rate of 200,000 web site reviews per month. Currently, if the service is installed on a user’s computer, Xmarks will show a ranking and starred review curated from Xmarks’ database of reviewed URLs and sites next to the search result on any Google or Bing search. With SearchBoost, Xmarks will add the ranking and starred review next to ads within these search results. This feature is live in Xmarks for Firefox, and is coming soon to Xmarks for IE and Xmarks for Chrome. Unfortunately, the feature’s technology doesn’t work with Safari.

So does SearchBoost promise higher click through rates? James Joaquin, CEO of Xmarks, says yes. In a study of over 200,000 users, Xmarks found that SearchBoost increased pay-per-click performance by 15%. Joaquin says that these ads are more trusted because of the ratings and starred reviews, so consumers tend to click on these ads vs. normal search ads that appear in Google or Bing searches.

Along with SearchBoost, advertisers will get an advanced analytics platform that gives them insight into the click through behavior and performance of both paid and organic search results. Using anonymous data from Xmarks’ community of four million plus users, Xmarks will show advertisers how many people have bookmarked their site, how many bookmarks competitors have, how may impressions, clicks their advertisements and URLs receive within the bookmarking community. Additionally, the analytics platform will show advertisers which search terms are delivering the most clicks across both paid and organic search results and more metrics. And Xmarks is now seeing an average of 15 million daily searches and 450 million searches per month.

SearchBoost, which includes the search ad offering and the analytics, has four levels of pricing. Level 1 will see you back $29 per month and allows for a maximum of 250 clicks on your ad, and a maximum of 25 different reports (each URL or search term is one report). Level 3 is $99 per month, offers 10,000 monthly clicks and 1000 reports. And Xmarks will also be offering a customized enterprise plan as well.

The product is appealing for advertisers, especially if it improves click through rates on ads within Google and Bing. And the price seems affordable for small businesses. But the caveat is that you’ll only be gaining data from Xmarks’ 4 million plus users.

Founded by Mitch Kapor and Todd Agulnick, Xmarks competes with other popular social bookmarking applications like Delicious and StumbleUpon, which also offers a paid advertising service. Xmarks has raised a total of $8 million in funding.

We just came across Packrati.us, a simple bookmarking service that allows you to essentially sync your Twitter feed with your Delicious bookmarks. Once you sign up with you Twitter and Delicious accounts, Packrati will follow your Twitter feed, and whenever one of your tweets contains URLs, the site will add them to your Delicious.com bookmarks.

You can also bookmark URLs in @replies to you. In your Delicious account, the service will include any hashtags you include as tags for your bookmark and include the full text of the tweet in the bookmark comments. Here’s an example of the White House Twitter account’s tweeted URLs in Delicious, using Packrati’s tool.

Last summer, Delicious launched a deeper integration with Twitter, to allow you to also tweet your bookmarked links out. Packrati’s ability to add the URLs your Tweet out to your Delicious bookmarks is so simple, yet serves as an incredibly useful tool to store and organize the links you send out. Of course, you may not want to bookmark all of the URLs you Tweet out, so the site could make your Delicious account a bit noisy.

Delicious, or del.icio.us as it used to be, was founded in 2003 by Jason Schachter. After growing in popularity relatively fast, it was purchased by Yahoo! in 2005. For the following 3 years, nothing really changed at Delicious and it quickly became known more as a sensible bookmarking service than anything particularly cutting edge. Shadowed by [...]