San Francisco – After giving pink slips to almost 600 employees representing 4 percent of its workers, search engine company Yahoo is planning to close out the content-sharing site Delicious as well.

A Yahoo slide containing the list of the companies in danger of being shut down leaked on the Internet Thursday. It was posted on Twitter, which is perhaps one of the main reasons why Delicious is no longer as important to Yahoo as it was five years ago when the search engine firm acquired it for an unknown sum.

The cleanup of the company started a couple of years ago when Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was hired to initiate a turnaround of the company. She had already shut down or sold several unprofitable or seldom used services so the search engine could concentrate on other aspects such as attracting traffic and selling advertising.

Bartz revealed that they are planning to venture into mobile, communications, and local services. Yahoo still has a lot of work to do as it is being left behind by other online companies such as Google and Facebook in terms of revenue growth.

Yahoo’s share increased by 6 cents to $16.51 when the stock market closed Thursday. The cost of its stocks is, however, slightly lower for 2010 and is not even close to its 2008 levels when it was considering the takeover offer from Microsoft Corporation. However, such plans went down the drain when Yahoo balked at Microsoft’s final offer of $33 per share in May 2008.

Yahoo acquired Delicious at a time its former CEO Terry Semel was planning to build a social hub. He even tempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion but such attempts was rejected by its founder Mark Zuckerberg, named Person of the Year by Time Magazine, for establishing perhaps the most popular social networking sites in the world. Delicious was established in 2003, when Facebook was still on its development stage in Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room.

Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, revealed that he was saddened by Yahoo’s acquisition of his company. He left Yahoo in 2008 and is presently developing Tasty Labs, which will attempt to convert social networks into an effective business tool.

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