When a former Yahoo employee leaked a list of products that the troubled company plans to shut down, many people were up in arms over the fact that one of the items on the list was Delicious--a social-bookmarking company Yahoo acquired in 2005 that still has a handful of loyal users.

But Delicious says it plans to find an exit strategy from Yahoo, not shut down.

"We are not shutting down Delicious," a post on the Delicious blog read. "While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo, we believe there is [an] ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive."

The wording of the post does not make it clear as to whether Delicious was facing the threat of a shutdown or whether Yahoo's plan had been to sell it all along. A handful of CEOs in the social-media business have publicly (and perhaps not seriously) posted blogs or tweets offering to buy Delicious from Yahoo, and there is at least one Twitter petition circulating on behalf of people who want it to be turned into an open-source product.

The post explains that the Delicious team is "actively thinking about the future of Delicious," and is "in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now."

Yahoo's planned shutdown of about a half dozen products and consolidation of a few more was revealed on Thursday, when the founder of another possibly doomed product, MyBlogLog, posted a screenshot from an internal presentation to Twitter. The product closings came hand in hand with the layoffs of several hundred Yahoo employees, and few of them were surprising. But even some nonusers were dismayed over the news of the Delicious shutdown, given that the service is widely regarded as a great product, and its framework of social news and tagging was arguably visionary.

But Yahoo had put it on a back burner long ago. Founder Joshua Schachter left the company two years ago and then headed to a stint at Google.