Del.icio.us, one of the two applications held up repeatedly in the “O’Reilly Radar” keynote at ETech 05 as exemplifying the new lightweight (in attitude, design, and development), affordance-focused, Web 2.0-style, has taken on some money so that its inventor, Joshua Schachter, can spend more time noodling and tagging the Web.
In a post to the del.icio.us mailing list, Joshua writes:
As you may know, I left my job a few weeks ago in order to devote myself full-time to del.icio.us. In order to make that posssible, I accepted an investment from a group of thoughtful and influential investors. The group I chose to work with understands my commitment to maintaining the integrity of the service and the security of your data. They were also willing to take a minority stake, which will keep me in control of the future of del.icio.us.
It’s good to see the likes of Union Square Ventures and Amazon.com (see Joshua’s posting for the complete list of investors) funding what is essentially an investment in Web 2.0 experimentation, particularly given the fate of Web 1.0 in the early 2000s.
(The other exemplar was of course Flickr, since purchased by Yahoo!.)
[Disclosure: Tim is a del.icio.us investor]