The future of social bookmarking service Delicious is no longer in doubt. Yahoo has sold the site to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who will fold it into a new company they have created called AVOS.

Delicious makes it clear in a FAQ about the deal that user data will be preserved and that the new team will "add new features and grow the service overall." Yahoo does ask that users sign in to Delicious "and agree to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks to the new owner," before the move is completed in July.

The deal follows months of speculation about the fate of Delicious, which Yahoo has been actively looking to sell (or "sunset," according to a now infamous presentation) since December. Last month it was rumored that Yahoo had sold Delicious for $5 million, a fraction of the price it reportedly paid for the startup back in 2005, though terms of the AVOS deal have not been disclosed.

Breaking away from Yahoo should come as good news to Delicious users that have remained loyal to the service through the recent turmoil. Among the priorities mentioned in the FAQ is a bookmark extension that works with Firefox 4.0, one of many things that has gone neglected as Yahoo trimmed resources from the project.

In the interim, a number of startups have made it easy for Delicious users to migrate over, with SpringPad reporting that 2 million Delicious bookmarks got moved to its servers within 10 days of the initial "sunset" drama. Google also launched a tool to make it easy for Delicious users to move their bookmarks to its Google Bookmarks service.

Now, we'll wait to see what Hurley and Chen have planned for the service and how it fits into their larger plan. Hurley indicated he was planning to shift focus to other projects last October.