Delicious may go down in tech history as the company everyone wanted to own, but no one wanted to keep.

The social bookmarking service, founded in the early 2000s, announced Thursday that it has been acquired by Science Inc., an L.A.-based incubator. This marks the third time Delicious has been sold off in less than a decade.

In late 2005, Delicious was acquired for the first time by Yahoo, which promised to give the startup "the resources, support and room it needs to continue growing," just as Yahoo had promised with Flickr, another company it acquired that year.

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A little more than five years later, in 2011, Yahoo decided to focus its efforts on core products and sold off Delicious to Avos, the company started by YouTube cofounders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley. At the time, Hurley promised to "take Delicious to the next level."

Three years later, Avos decided that it, too, needed to focus its efforts on core products and agreed to sell Delicious once again to Science Inc.

Michael Jones, CEO of Science and a former CEO of MySpace, believes there is potential in the Delicious community. However, given the history of Delicious acquisitions, he is careful not to over-promise for what he and his company will deliver.

"I'm not going to have delusions of grandeur," Jones told Mashable. "We are going to start with some changes, understand the audience base and over time if we are strong and diligent with that, we will build a great service."

Jones first approached Chen and Hurley about buying Delicious three months ago. He was attracted to Delicious by what he describes as a "very stable" community — there are about two million active users currently — and a trove of social data.

"It has an incredible amount of data with all the links that get submitted into the Delicious system. It has substantial daily traffic," he says. "For us, that felt like something that was stable and exciting to work on."

No staff was brought on as part of the deal, just the web property. The existing team at Science will handle the day-to-day operations. Jone says his team has already removed some of the advertising products on Delicious and plans to talk with top users on the service to help decide on new features and user experience changes.

Ultimately, Jones says any changes to Delicious will be "slow and steady." At least in that sense, the team at Science may be learning from the mistakes of some of Delicious's previous owners.

"We wanted to reposition Delicious to a new set of users and hopefully jump start growth," Hurley, the YouTube cofounder, told Mashable in a 2012 interview. "As we've learned throughout this experience, it's hard to just introduce that stuff right off the bat with an existing community."

Terms of the latest Delicious acquisition were not disclosed.