The popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us launched a complete redesign of its service today. Ever since it was bought by Yahoo in 2005, the company added very few new features and the redesign had been rumored to be in the works for almost a year now. The new design and features are mostly focused on enhancing the speed of the service and improving its search capabilities. Del.icio.us can also now be reached at delicious.com and will start using this as its standard URL.
The new features include selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks. Delicious also says that it has made strides in improving its speed and making the site more responsive. Based on our short tests here, we would definitely have to agree with that.
Delicious has also worked an enhancing its search. Users can now search within their own tags, another user's bookmarks, and, maybe most interestingly, within their own social network on Delicious.
In our short tests of the new design so far, we have come away quite impressed. The new interface, which highlights the tags a lot more, feels a lot cleaner and snappier. It's also now a lot easier to edit items you have already bookmarked.
Delicious now also puts a lot more emphasis on the social aspects of its service - a trend we already noted back in 2006. We especially noticed that it now prompts its users to fill out their profile information more persistently. Before, few users ever bothered to do so. While before, the focus was on subscriptions and 'your network,' the new interface emphasizes more of 'friending' paradigm.
One area where Delicious can still improve is in giving its users recommendation based on their bookmarking behavior. Currently, Delicious neither recommends potentially interesting links, nor does it highlight users who bookmark similar items.
Overall, while some of its competitors soared past Delicious in the last few months in terms of features, this update puts Delicious at the top of the pack again. We have come away highly impressed with the new interface and while all the new and enhanced features are definitely a boon to the service, the real advantage of this new design is that it makes using a lot of the old features a lot easier, especially for novice users.
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As a long-time fan of del.icio.us I'm glad that the update has finally happened and that it has been worth it. It will take me a long time to get used to the new URL, though.
Posted by: andymurd | July 31, 2008 12:21 PM
Does it allow mass-editing (especially delete) of bookmarks yet??
Posted by: Ken Riise | July 31, 2008 12:28 PM
Good point Ken - as far as I can see, it does not allow any mass-editing yet.
Posted by: Frederic Lardinois | July 31, 2008 12:39 PM
Great work of course but... WTF with its name? It was much better before.
Posted by: pickupjojo | July 31, 2008 1:09 PM
good god. that does a bit cleaner doesn't it. nothing revolutionary though.
I like how they presented the tags. I think more innovative stuff could happen on the discovery side of things though. maybe a cool way to mix & match tags like this cool flash interface.
Posted by: Tony | July 31, 2008 1:13 PM
Just wanted to remind everyone that Delicious 2.0 is a PHP application written on the open-source Symfony framework.
Posted by: Dan Grossman | July 31, 2008 2:09 PM
I think it is much better now than before... Also I like the name change...
love*ice
car insurance
Posted by: krissybee14 | July 31, 2008 2:51 PM
I think delicious got it right this time around. Question is: can they get their buzz back? Normally, once you lost your pizzazz you can't get it back. Let's wait and see, good luck to them!
Posted by: Gonzalo Arzuaga | July 31, 2008 3:21 PM
I still miss the feature "show content tagged A not tagged B", i.e. a "-" to complete the "+". This would be useful for ticking off content and probably in many other situations.
Posted by: Calle | July 31, 2008 3:47 PM
Eh..
Its unbelievable - but they STILL dont support tag combinations in tag bundles! I waited for that function to arrive. I dont really understand why they doesnt developed it
What is the use for tag bundles if you cant use tag-combinations? Its no more than containers of unrelated tags then..
Posted by: bollon | July 31, 2008 5:50 PM
Still no OpenID support and still now way to rate your bookmarks.
I'm not leaving ma.gnolia just yet. :)
Posted by: Johan | July 31, 2008 11:42 PM
Which one has the priority. Function or Interface. If it's interface, ok, well done. It looks as good as other web 2.0 craps on the web. If it's function, sorry but there is nothing new and don't call it version 2.0.
Posted by: Loneship | August 1, 2008 3:08 AM
Love the new look
Posted by: Sachendra Yadav | August 1, 2008 3:58 AM
looks nice..
is it really faster??
Posted by: tyas | August 1, 2008 6:07 AM
Kudos to delicious on the re.design, looks very sweet.
Its refreshing to see a web company that is not copycatting their ideas and design approach. Conversely they are raising the bar and setting new UI standards that others will follow I'm sure.
Even in a utility service like bookmarking, we can have a nice subtle design ascetic that doesn't overshadow the usability, which is the primary goal.
Posted by: Michael Moir | August 1, 2008 11:06 AM
A solid update. Congrats to the delicious team.
Posted by: Todd Sieling | August 1, 2008 2:44 PM
How did this take 3 years? I hope a lot of the changes are behind the scenes allowing them to make more improvements faster.
Posted by: Scott | August 1, 2008 3:06 PM
Hi,
If you're looking for a bulk edit tool (or mass deletes, or changing the default sharing behaviour etc), Delicious has an official one in the works.
In the meantime, the unofficial mass editing tool "Scripted Re-Mark" has been upgraded to work with the new interface.
http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/re-mark/
Power users can still apply regular expressions and arbitrary JavaScript code to your bookmarks as well as tidy up tags with Porter stemming.
Posted by: Greg | August 11, 2008 12:28 AM