Back in 2005 (a long time in the social media world), Yahoo (YHOO) acquired Delicious, the popular social bookmarking website. Both Yahoo and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter had big plans to change the way we share, remember, and discover information on the Internet. Yahoo even promised “to give Delicious the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community.”

So where is it now? Unfortunately, in the case of Delicious, nowhere.

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Yahoo’s (YHOO) bookmarking service Delicious unveiled a redesign that highlights social features such as the ability to see which links other Web users are discussing the most.

Vik Singh, a software architect at Yahoo, said in a blog post that the changes are based on TweetNews, an application he developed that adds related tweets to recent Yahoo News articles.

“We thought about where else we could apply this model, and in short order selected a Yahoo property that we felt could benefit greatly from a social-freshness lift: the delicious homepage,” he said…

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This week Diigo acquired fellow social-bookmarking service Furl from LookSmart, a San Francisco online advertising company. Terms weren’t disclosed, but LookSmart said in a statement it would receive “a potential equity position” in Diigo in exchange for Furl.

LookSmart bought Furl in 2004, and while it reached one million users, it didn’t quite catch on like Delicious, which has five million users and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

LookSmart’s unloading of Furl isn’t the first consolidation made in the social bookmarking space this year. Yahoo (YHOO) recently closed down MyWeb in order to focus on Delicious, and Google (GOOG) just shuttered Shared Stuff.

Yesterday, as LookSmart discussed its earnings with analysts, CEO Ted West said the company faced several challenges with Furl. “We did see substantial commoditization of social bookmarking services and their availability across the web–commoditization in terms of numbers of providers,” he said.

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Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Delicious. These are all social sites that are well known for sharing stories with a massive amount of people. Yahoo Buzz? Not so much. But apparently, it’s also in the business of sharing stories. And today is its first birthday.

In a message it sent out on Twitter, Yahoo (YHOO) notes that a story is buzzed (voted on) every two seconds. It claims that 300 million story clicks have resulted from buzzed-up stories that make Yahoo.com–and incredibly, that it’s the number one social content site.

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In the networked Web era, influentials may not be people with a particularly connected temperament or Rolodex, or people who control and influence monopoly distribution channels (e.g., newspapers), but rather people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the Web–the link. People like bloggers, top Diggers, power users, Facebook users who share lots of links, MySpace users who embed videos, Twitter users who post lots of URLs, or any social-network user with links to lots of friends.

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