It looks like Yahoo has been looking for a home for Delicious for some time now. On his Diggnation web show this week, Digg founder Kevin Rose said that Yahoo contacted Digg to see if the company would be interested in taking over Delicious prior to when an internal slide leaked indicating Yahoo wanted to get rid if it and before the December layoffs (which would put the time period at early December/late November). In the video, Rose addresses this around the 36 minute mark.

Rose said that at first he thought that Yahoo was trying to sell Delicious off (which is what we assumed as well), but then realized that Yahoo was simply trying to find a home for the bookmarking service. Rose confirmed that Yahoo and Digg had preliminary talks simply about how much it would cost for the upkeep of Delicious.

Shortly after these early conversations, Rose said the news broke that Yahoo was planning to “sunset” Delicious and a number of other services in the Yahoo product family. Which is when he Tweeted that he would “really like to buy del.icio.us and make a seriously rad social bookmarking site, screenshot archives of bookmarks/audio annotations etc.”

Rose has a few compelling ideas to breathe new life into Delicious, including the ability to take static snapshots of a webpage at a given moment so users always have access to what a site looked like when they initially bookmarked it. Another possible feature, says Rose, could be an audio recording feature that would allow users to add audio annotations to bookmarks to add additional context to bookmark sharing. He’d also add pro accounts, and try to make a profit from the service.

Rose says he would definitely take over Delicious but didn’t offer any updates on whether this would actually happen. He added that he contacted Delicious’ original founder Joshua Schachter to see if he would want to back the project but as we know Schacter is pursuing other projects. Rose says that he’s hoping it finds a good home and he’d ‘love to do something cool with it’ but doesn’t know if Yahoo would give Delicious to him.

Thanks to @UniPaul for the tip.