It has been a tough past few months for Yahoo and Delicious in general. The turmoil started out in December 2010 when a leaked PowerPoint slide showed that Yahoo was sun setting Delicious. This led to several users switching to Delicious alternatives.

Yahoo later on confirmed that Delicious was not shutting down and would be kept alive while they looked for potential buyers. They did have a hard time finding any buyers but have finally been able to sell Delicious to the founders of YouTube.

According to a blog post and help page on Delicious, Yahoo will continue transitioning the property and will operate it till July 2011 after which it will be handed over to the new owners.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.

Providing a seamless transition for users is incredibly important for both companies. Yahoo! will continue to operate Delicious until approximately July 2011. When the transition period is complete, your information will be moved over to Delicious’ new owner.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen acquired delicious as part of their company AVOS. They have promised users the same great service as they are accustomed to.

As a part of the transition process, users will have to login to Delicious and then transfer their account to AVOS. Users will have to convert their Yahoo accounts to Delicious accounts as part of this process. Users would have to either create new usernames or continue using their old Delicious accounts.

It’s definitely going to be a long journey for both Delicious and AVOS along with users of the service. If you think that you want to pack your bags and move out of Delicious here are some articles which might come in helpful to you.

• Import Delicious Bookmarks To Google Bookmarks
• Top Delicious Alternatives To Hop Onto
• How To Import Delicious Bookmarks Into Xmarks, Diigo, Chrome, Opera, Firefox or IE
• How To Export Delicious Bookmarks and Tag

So are you going to stick around with Delicious or move on to another alternative? Do let me know.

Back in December, Yahoo almost created chaos and destroyed a popular product; Delicious, with a leaked PowerPoint presentation. Many people freaked out and tried to export their Delicious bookmarks out so that their data would remain safe.

We also wrote about several Delicious Alternatives for Bookmarking and ways to import your Delicious bookmarks into Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Diigo and Xmarks, but it looks like Google too now wants your Delicious bookmarks and have launched a tool to import your bookmarks into Google Bookmarks.

As reported by Mashable, the Delicious to Google Bookmarks tool will help you import your Delicious bookmarks to Google Bookmarks. The import tools uses Yahoo’s OAuth validation to fetch your bookmarks from Delicious and then adds it to your Google Bookmarks account. You will have to provide your username and password if you haven’t migrated your Delicious account to a Yahoo account. Google will not store any of your credentials after the import process is complete.

In a move that will definitely surprise a lot of people, Xmarks – the popular bookmark synchronization tool, has announced that it will be shutting down in approximately 3 months.

Xmarks, which started off as a Firefox extension called Foxmarks, offered free cloud based bookmark synchronization for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer. In spite of the introduction of out of the box bookmark synchronization to recent versions of Firefox and Chrome, Xmarks managed to remain wildly popular due to its ability to cross-sync bookmarks among different browsers.

Earlier today, in a lengthy blog post, Todd Agulnick, the Co-Founder and CTO of Xmarks, explored the events that ultimately led to the demise of Xmarks.

By Spring 2010, with money running tight and options fading, we started searching for potential buyers of the company. Over the past three months, we have been remarkably close to striking a deal, only to have the potential buyer get cold feet. We also considered refocusing Xmarks as a freemium sync business, but the prospects there are grim too: with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down. Our plan is to keep the service running for another 90+ days, after which the plug will be pulled.

There’s nothing unusual about startups collapsing due to the lack of a viable user model. Yet, one can’t help feeling sorry for Xmarks, simply because it was a damn useful service. It’s a pity that they decided to fold even without trying the freemium model.

Earlier today, Amit posted a note here, which told you about a Firefox add-on to create short URLs with Goo.gl. My immediate thought was:

How can I create Goo.gl links if I’m not using Firefox?

I wasn’t a bit surprised to find an answer at Marklets.com, one of my favorite spots to grab new bookmarklets. Bookmarklets will usually work in any modern web browser. If you don’t know what bookmarklets are, see this FAQ.

Now, I’ll part the curtain to display the Goo.gl Bookmarklet:

Drag the link above and drop it onto your web browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar, or right click and copy the address, then create a new bookmark. You can then move it to your bookmarks toolbar folder.

To use the Goo.gl bookmarklet, all you have to do is click the bookmarklet in your toolbar when you are at a page that you want to shorten the URL for. Here’s what you’ll see when you click the bookmarklet.

After the popup appears, highlight the short URL and copy it.

Here at Techie Buzz, we have also posted several other useful bookmarklets and links to lists of bookmarklets. You can find our posts about bookmarklets here.

Techie Buzz Verdict:

This bookmarklet could use some work. It would be nice if there were an easier way to grab the short URL instead of highlighting and copying. I also have to question the use of Goo.gl for shortening website addresses. Currently, there are far better URL shortening services out there, such as bit.ly and others we’ve mentioned before.

Techie Buzz Rating: 2/5 (Below Average)

In our previous post of the Best Google Chrome Extensions, we had tried to enlist some of the most useful extensions  for Google Chrome, however we did miss out on extensions which would help you to easily share content on social networking sites.

AddToAny Chrome Extension

An official AddToAny Chrome extension which will allow you to quickly share content on several social bookmarking and social networking sites.

Download AddToAny Google Chrome Extension

Shareaholic Chrome Extension

Another Social bookmarking extension from the popular Shareholic, just click and share. Download Shareaholic Chrome Extension.

Want more extensions for Google Chrome? Check out our earlier coverage on Google Chrome Extensions to view some of the best add-ons for Google Chrome.

I have been using the same set of bookmarks for the last 6-7 years by regularly backing up bookmarks and synchronizing them across computers and browsers. Considering that it has been so long, I am pretty sure that there are several bookmarks which are actually dead links, maybe because the website shut down or maybe because the website was shifted to a new location.

Sifting through the bookmarks to find dead links after all these years is pretty cumbersome if not impossible. In comes AM-DeadLink a excellent freeware utility which will scan your bookmarks and allow you to delete dead bookmarks from Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer.

You can install the software on your PC, or choose to install it as a portable software. Once installation is complete, launch the software and choose the browser you want to scan the bookmarks for and click on the Scan button.

The scanning process may take a few minutes depending on the number of bookmarks you have, in my case it took a little over 10 minutes. Once the scan is complete you will see the error and status for the bookmark URL. If you see errors in the bookmark, you can easily delete it using AM-DeadLink.

Please note that Google Chrome support is only available in AM-DeadLink 4.0 Beta 1. Download links are below.

Techie Buzz Verdict

AM-DeadLink is an excellent software which will help you organize your bookmarks and get rid of the unwanted ones. The fact that it allows you to manage bookmarks for multiple browsers makes it more useful.

Though AM-DeadLink is not for everyday use, you can always use it whenever you perform your computer maintenance to cleanup your dead bookmarks. Am-DeadLink is compatible with Windows 7.

Rating: 4.5/5 (Excellent)

Download AM-DeadLink | Download AM-DeadLink Beta [via GHacks]

Google Chrome still does not have the ability to add a toolbar like Google Toolbar and any other one’s in fact, there are many people who use several toolbars to track SEO information like Page Rank and more.

The Distilled blog has come up with a list of interesting and useful bookmarks related to SEO for Google Chrome, that will help you perform several tasks like check page rank (which is a exclusive Techie Buzz tool), count number of links and so on.

The Google Chrome SEO Buttons Include

• Count Links: displays the number of links on the current page (showing internal and external)
• NoFollow Highlighter: adds a light red background to any NoFollow-ed links on the current page
• Google Site: search: shows all indexed pages from this site
• Google’s Cached Version: shows the cached version of the current page
• Google PageRank: pops up a window showing the current page’s PageRank
• SEO Playground Tool: opens a useful information pane by Dave Naylor
• Y! Link Report for this Page: shows the Yahoo! SiteExplorer links for the current page
• Y! Link Report for this Subdomain: as above, but for the whole site
• WolframAlpha stats about this Page: may show some useful info about the current page
• Twitter Mentions of this Site: uses BackTweets to show recent mentions of the site on Twitter
• Blog Mentions of this Site: uses SocialMention to show recent mentions of the site on blogs
• Other Sites at this IP: data from My IP Neighbors
• Edit Page Text: allows you to edit the text on any page
• SEOMoz Pro Tools: this folder allows easy access to useful tools for SEOMoz’s Pro Members

Head over to the Google Chrome Plugins for SEO to download and install these bookmarks and bookmarklets for Google Chrome.

XMarks is a nice way to synchronize and store your browser bookmarks online, however not many would feel comfortable storing their passwords and bookmarks on a third party server.

Here is some good news, Xmarks have now released a new version specifically for users who want to sync their data to their own servers.

The BYOS edition will allow users to specify their own servers where they can sync all their bookmarks and password and restore them or access them from multiple places.

The BYOS edition of Xmarks provides the following features;

• Does not communicate with our servers except to open a tab in your browser after an upgrade to tell you what’s new.
• Does not contain any Discovery features.
• Will be upgraded much less frequently than our standard Xmarks add-ons.

Xmarks BYOS is currently only available as a Firefox add-on, you will have to uninstall the older Xmarks add-on before you can start using Xmarks BYOS.

Introducing Xmarks Bring Your Own ServerBETA [Xmarks Blog]

Google Chrome does have a bookmark manager, but it does lack a lot of features that are available in other mainstream browsers.

Chrome Bookmark Manager does allow users to sort bookmarks by name, but it only allows you to do this for one folder at a time.

Chrome Bookmarks Sorter is a handy tool which will allow users to sort bookmarks recursively by name or date added through all of your bookmark folders.

To recursively sort bookmarks in Google Chrome, close all Google Chrome windows and launch this application, select the parameters you want to sort the bookmarks as, and click on the Sort Bookmarks button.

The utility will take care of reordering the bookmarks as you have chosen. Chrome Bookmarks Sorter is a portable software.

Download Chrome Bookmarks Sorter [via Life Hacker]

Although there were blabs about a conceptual Digg bar for the social bookmarking site Digg some time back, there wasn’t any update on it until today when Digg has officially released it.

Here you have it, the DiggBar! DiggBar is a simple overlay toolbar which lets you digg stories easily, without the annoyance of toggling between the digg page and the original story page. Let’s put it this way: Whenever you want to digg a webpage, just put digg.com/ before the url and hit enter. A slick overlying toolbar comes up, from where you can easily digg the story.

Apart from digging options, you get several other features like burying the story, browsing related articles and surfing other submissions from the same site. Adding to its social flavors, you can also twitter the article or post its link on your facebook page along with shouting the article to your digg friends.

It’s also interesting to note that digg has added a Random’ button to its toolbar, directly competing with StumbleUpon which offers a similar random discover feature. You can also view the comments on a story you are visiting with the toolbar, although to post a comment, you will have to follow a link which will lead to its corresponding digg page.

When you view a story from the diggbar, its url changes into a shortened digg url, like http://digg.com/d1nnVZ which was previously http://blog.digg.com/?p=591

This is how you can use the DiggBar

If twitter is something that interests you, Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, also noted in the official announcement that soon the users of the twitter client twhirl’ will be able to use digg’s shortened urls as their default url shortening service, sounds interesting!

Any way round, Digg seems to have pulled up its sleeves to climb high in the social media race. Meanwhile, you can check out the overview video that Kevin Rose posted about the DiggBar.

DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.