Yahoo! exec! exodus! continues!

Last one to leave, please turn out the lights

Delicious founder Joshua Schacter yesterday joined the swelling ranks of executives quitting Yahoo!.

The firm said in a statement yesterday: "Joshua Schachter has contributed greatly to Delicious' success and Yahoo's success in our social search efforts...Yahoo wishes him well in his next endeavor." It added that he will leave at the end of June.

The social bookmarking service was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005 – the same year the company bought photo-sharing website Flickr, whose founders earlier this week announced that they too were quitting the struggling internet giant.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times which quotes Yahoo! insiders, three more senior executives are set to leave the firm.

It reports that key Yahoo! biz strategists Qi Lu, Vish Makhijani and Brad Garlinghouse are moving on.

However, Yahoo! declined to confirm the departures. Instead it said in a statement: “We have a deep and talented management team across all areas of the company,” and added that Yahoo! was experiencing “the attrition that’s to be expected in the internet industry”.

In 2006 senior veep Garlinghouse criticised Yahoo! in a notorious leaked memo known as the Peanut Butter manifesto. He grumbled at the time that the company was spreading itself too thinly - offering too many services and lacking focus.

Meanwhile, Yahoo!’s high-profile developer Jeremy Zawodny who quit the firm last week announced that he has a new job with Craigslist.

He said in a blog post yesterday: "Over the course of about three seconds, something clicked in my little brain, and I realised that Craigslist is a pretty unique combination of things: a small company with a solid financial base, a great service that I use myself, a focused group of people who really care about doing things well, and an open source-friendly environment." ®