So, about a week after I finally started paying attention to del.icio.us, Yahoo bought it. This comes hot on the heels of Yahoo buying Flickr and Upcoming.org, and of eBay's rather odd purchase of Skype. It seems clear that Yahoo, at least, is looking to make an end-around run at Google, challenging it on the service periphery, while not really attacking at all Google's central stronghold -- the search engine. I'm skeptical about this strategy, to be honest, and I'm really curious to see what eBay and Amazon are going to do in 2006. Google's put themselves in a position of vulnerability by announcing so many projects that never seem to get out of beta (Google News -- GOOGLE FUCKING NEWS! -- is still in beta), but if they can start to complete and integrate some of these things better, Yahoo may be arming up for a conflict that never happens.