While very many media outlets support del.icio.us in their bookmarking and social media strategies, there has been very little innovation in the del.icio.us social bookmarking platform — this has been a major problem with properties that have been acquired by big firms such as AOL, Google, and Yahoo!, in the case of del.icio.us. Allen Stern wrote a very insightful post, Did Delicious Lose Its Chance To Be FriendFeed?, about how FriendFeed has started to take del.icio.us’ lunch based on innovation and creativity:

[...]Had Delicious (and Yahoo) moved faster on the release could they have become what’s hot with FriendFeed today? I get that FriendFeed allows you to share your delicious bookmarks. But what I am talking about here is something much bigger strategically. By “sitting” on the release, the team lost their chance to move the strategy forward.

[...]Had Yahoo wanted to actually take their Delicious investment and do something with it, how hard would it have been to add the same functionality? If we look back a year, Delicious had a much larger “buzz share” than they do today. When I look at the CN logs, we rarely see any traffic from Delicious and haven’t had a frontpage link in probably nine months. Yet in the last week, I’ve seen way more traffic from FriendFeed. Yahoo’s Delicious service has a “close to mainstream” userbase and sure missed a golden opportunity to move forward – a fail whale if you will.

[...]If you look at the topic I’ve discussed here, it’s basically what Fred Wilson discussed when he wrote about stagnation when companies acquire startups. Who will come up next and displace Upcoming and/or Flickr as the techies choice?

Oh, and be sure to join me on FriendFeed as well as del.icio.us!