Delicious Reborn as Real-Time News Tracker
Yahoo's social bookmarking service Delicious launched a new home page this morning, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter to deliver what it calls the hottest news from around the web in real time. While the exact formula behind the front page remains unclear, its contents are clearly changing minute by minute.
It is something the site probably should have done a while ago and if done correctly could make other services, like Digg, look all the more behind the times. The move could also help Delicious survive the coming Yahoo Search purge at the hands of Bing.
The new front page is focused on political and tech news instead of the most popular topic on Delicious, web design. There also appears to be some smart filtering of the Twitter messages being counted, as the numbers are far lower than other services' counts and seem to exclude the spammy retweeting bots that pump up big news sources in other retweet counting services.
We've long believed that Delicious is one of the most under-appreciated social media services remaining from the early days of the social web. This new version could help win back some of the early love, but it does represent a radical shift away from the original vision most people have of the service as a tool for bookmarking things you want to return to later. The founder of Delicious, Joshua Schacter, said on Twitter last night "i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal."
The pressure on Digg to find a way to speed up the pace with which it surfaces news on its front page has got to be growing. Note that Delicious hasn't decided to put its links inside a toolbar as Digg, StumbleUpon and many other services have. That's nice.
For a closer look at Delicious and the real-time web, see our recent posts Five Great Delicious Hacks, in Five Minutes, for Delicious's 5th Birthday and our Introduction to the Real-Time Web.
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yep. delicious also jump on the realtime train.
btw, one link is broken. ping to you ;/>
"The new front page is focused on political and tech news instead of the most popular topic on Delicious, web design."
Well that sucks. As if we didn't have enough politics and tech news portals already. Delicious may have been niche in the content, but I liked it for that, because it was great at it.
Bring it back!
Ilya, I think you might be on to something there. Everybody's trying to solve the real-time news problem, but delicious has something else quite well. None the less, just click on the Popular tab and it will be like nothing ever changed. Except that popular bookmarked items will now be influenced by the front pages, which tilts towards news. Oh well!
Disclaimer: I wrote a lot of the code for this feature when I still worked at Delicious.
It's not so much jumping on the real-time train. Delicious always had real-time data via the /recent feed. This algorithm is simply pulling out some of the more interesting bits of the data out.
Ilya - the "hotlist" page still exists: http://delicious.com/?view=hotlist
Thanks for the write-up. We actually did consider a bar - but then Digg tried their hand at one and it showed a lot of the UX flaws that a Tinyfication+Framing does. IMO, it would be a bad fit for the Delicious product no matter how we did it.
I hope my former colleagues at Delicious are concocting up other interesting data mashups. Delicious is often overlooked, but it's quite a powerful data platform.
Thanks Dave, great to hear your perspective and good work on the product. I agree, it is quite a powerful data platform.
Dave, great clarification. I'm wondering though, how does the algorithm determine what's "more interesting bits of data?"
Actually I like the idea of integrating Delicious and Twitter. It's still about saving links for further use - I often save the link and twitter it directly to the possible interested followers. Couldn't that be only one step?
Thanks so much for opting out of the framing bar. Here's hoping you start a trend!
And they forgot to add an rss feed, bummer.
Thanks for the clarification Dave.
I wonder how this is going to change the traffic distribution though. Somehow, I reckon that my posts (much more technical in nature) will not see the frontpage of delicious anymore (there goes that traffic opportunity).
Time will tell..
ig
Really like Delicious. And real time news on delicious is a good move long awaited one.
I think bit.ly should go with this feature as well...
Delicious Reborn As Real Time News Tracker http://bit.ly/17pRn9 whoa! [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3125583513]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 13, 2009 8:11 AM
I saw an article today that hopes these types of devices or applications may be the saviour for the newspapers. I still have my doubts because you don't need a kindle to get your news, it's still free online.