Youtube founders move onto next big thing

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are diving into their next big project on the Internet.

You may have heard of their last creation – it was a little video sharing site called Youtube. That venture gave them enough funds to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

That’s not stopping them from trying to generate more buzz on the World Wide Web, though. The duo is now working on injecting new life into an online tool that has lost a lot of popularity lately.

The site is called Delicious, or as you’ve most likely seen it, del.icio.us. It’s a link sharing site, which was quite the fad a few years ago – sites like Delicious and Digg were widely popular because it allowed users to vet what online content was good or bad.

Of course, the whole market of link sharing site has become rather irrelevant since anyone who wants to mark a particular site as fun or interesting now most likely uses Facebook or Twitter.

But Hurley and Chen see a future for Delicious. The only thing is they don’t see the future in the US. “What we plan to do is try to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world,” said Hurley in a New York Times interview.

The one good thing about a site like Delicious that Twitter and Facebook can’t do is it sorts the content based on popularity. That is, you can see what news story or website is ranked as the most popular for that day. It’s much more easily organized.

“Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day. There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on,” said Chen.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t appear Delicious will be making a huge comeback in the US. That is, unless Chen and Hurley manage to make waves in other parts of the world. If that happens, it might make a surge back here.

It won’t be another Youtube, but it’s cool to see the two talented guys working on another ambitious project.