Yahoo has sold the social bookmarking website Delicious to YouTube founders Chard Hurley and Steve Chen. The news will come as a relief to Delicious's small but loyal user-baser who threw a fit late last year when rumors spread that Yahoo was shuttering the service. In a statement on Delicious's blog, the company said Chen and Hurley "are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward."

Delicious allows users to archive their favorite links and seek out similar websites of interest. Many users feared that they'd lose all of that information if Delicious went belly up. With the sale, all Delicious accounts will be safely transferred for "uninterrupted use of the service" to Hurley and Chen's company AVOS. Though it's not exactly clear how Hurley and Chen will improve the service, they're likely seen as some of the best possible buyers. When the turmoil over Delicious's future began last December, some of it's vocal users, like Hutch Carpenter, urged Google to acquire the company in keeping with its mission to "organizing the world's information." Ending up with the founders of one of Google's most important assets isn't a bad consolation prize. Here are links to the official statements from Yahoo and Delicious.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at jhudson at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
John Hudson