Similarly, on the new Delicious you create stacks organized around specific interests, and then you can follow other stacks.

The goal of Delicious' redesign was to appeal to more mainstream users. Quora writes that its new goal "reflects the broader system we are evolving into: to connect you with everything you want to know about."

As both Quora and Delicious organize around interests rather than questions-and-answers or keywords, both of these sites transform into visually focused topic-specific channels, which look a lot like StumbleUpon's redesign. It's true that the social Web has become too cluttered. But is this the best way to organize it?

Are Quora and Delicious doing it wrong? Or is this just how the social Web is evolving? Tell us what you think in the comments.

In fact, AdAge spoke with Shannon King, GM of digital for Real Simple magazine, who said that Pinterest has referred "more traffic to the site than even Facebook."

Where does that leave Delicious? Trying to figure out who its new core audience is post re-design, especially since tech geeks are pretty much over it.

In an attempt to make stacks more visually appealing, Delicious has staggered them to look just like Pinterest's.

YouTube Co-Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen bought Delicious from Yahoo earlier this year with plans to make it more appealing to mainstream users.

Will the latest Delicious overhaul officially push it, and social bookmarking, mainstream?

It's a bookmarking app along the lines of Delicious or Pinboard but without social sharing, with a stripped-down Reader view of all articles and with a nice simple aesthetic. Lallo says a number of new features are in the works and if you like simple tools developers build for solving everyday problems, Kippt could be a good service to try out and keep an eye on.

Kippt has been in the works since at least the beginning of the year and is just now being relaunched. The intent is to make it easy to save links quickly so that they can be read across multiple devices.

"Having a library and finding new things is important to me," Saarinen says. "This is our first attempt on the problem, focusing on bookmarking." Saarinen is a co-founder of ArcticStartup, among other things.

What's in the future for Kippt? "Social. Sharing bookmarks & lists," Saarinen says.

Trailblazing social bookmarking service Delicious relaunched this morning under new management: Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, the co-founders of YouTube who bought the neglected service from Yahoo earlier this year. The plan is to make the service appealing to a larger number of mainstream users. So far it's pretty underwhelming.

When Yahoo bought Delicious years ago, I was disappointed it wasn't the Library of Congress that made the acquisition. It was that useful. Now this new Delicious looks like just another Web 2.0 startup.

Unfortunately, a lot of the best parts of the old site have been lost. The most Popular links for a tag are broken and there are no longer RSS feeds being made readily available.

I don't like it. I want to like it, but I don't so far.

When news emerged that Yahoo was really done with Delicious last December, I wrote about how extensively and strategically we use it here at ReadWriteWeb.

A tool that lets everyday people organize links of interest to them and as a result create user-generated metadata, discovery pipelines, resource search powered by passive popularity - the power and potential of the network effects in the old Delicious were amazing.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that those qualities were appreciated in the relaunch. Quite the opposite. (No RSS feeds?!) The concept of collections of websites ("stacks") doesn't feel new or fresh anymore. Big pictures are nice but they're hardly new or fresh either.

Right: At least the default avatar is cool.

It feels to me like in its effort to go mainstream, the new Delicious has lost or underplayed its strengths and not yet shown us anything new that has world-changing potential. Maybe it will come back as a result of the tagging that happens as stacks are created. I don't know.

I clicked through the Featured Tags section of the site, then clicked on Web 2.0 and you know what I found? A link to defunct social browser Flock and a Mashable article about the top Web 2.0 startups...of 2005. Oh well.

Hopefully something good will come of it all. Or someone else will capture and grow the dream that Delicious represented back in the day. Or maybe we should all just go grunt and Like things on Facebook after all.

Delicious didn't really work out that well in the long run, though, and, five years after it was acquired, then neglected, by Yahoo, it was bought this spring by a team led by Youtube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Jenna Wortham of the New York Times caught up with the new company this weekend and reported on some of the thinking behind the forthcoming rebirth of Delicious. What it needs, I believe, is to be easier to use, more relevant and more attractive in design.

In order to make Delicious appealing to a wider variety of people than the web tech tinkerers who have appreciated it to date, Chen and Hurley say they plan on turning it into a destination site with:

• Topical "stacks" of multimedia content on particular topics, like a big event in the news.
• Bundles of links curated regarding a particular topic, like planning a vacation to a particular place.
• Personalized recommendations, hopefully based on aggregate data collected from the site and a user's own behavior. It's interesting; that's roughly related to what Delicious founder Joshua Schachter is now doing with his new site, Jig. It's very algorithm driven, under the covers.

That all sounds good. But I think it may need more. It's all about helping new and non-technical users, maybe users who are less likely to explore a complex website, to capture the network effects of everyone else's bookmarking with minimal work on their part. The old 90/10 rule may be applicable: if only 10% of the visitors to Delicious are actively bookmarking links themselves, and everyone is reading and searching, that could be a great turn of events. Hopefully a growing number of people will come to read and then 10% will convert and the ranks of the taggers will grow.

What I Think Delicious Will Need

I love Delicious. I think I've probably made use of it in ways that few people have (unfortunately) and have captured huge amounts of value from it. I really want it to thrive. Here's what I think the new team behind it ought to consider. In response to this post, former Delicious product manager Simon Davison said to me on Twitter this morning, "All of those [ideas] and 200+ more were included as a part of the internal wiki that came with Delicious."

1. Delicious is really a search engine, in large part. People are arguably growing disillusioned with the search offerings of Google and Bing and Google is already looking to serve up "what you want before you know to ask for it." That's something Delicious could help with.

   The company has a huge collection of legacy bookmarks, links validated by a human intention to read them and manual assignment of topic categories. That backlog should be made use of. I tell people all the time, when they ask me questions about Web technologies, to go look it up on Delicious. You want to know about the Semantic Web? Go check out http://www.delicious.com/popular/semanticweb You want to know some cool things about Portland, Oregon? http://www.delicious.com/popular/portland is a good place to start. Delicious should build the capacity to find popular links with two tags for more sophisticated structured searches. For example, we should be able to search http://www.delicious.com/popular/portland+coffee and not just http://www.delicious.com/tag/portland+coffee (though that's cool too). Without having to look at URLs, which apparently most people can't be allowed to see lest they wet themselves, but being able to keep using those same URL structures if you're a grownup is important as well.

2. There needs to be some passive tagging enabled. The whole tagging experience should be made smoother and users ought to be able to opt-into having some categorization done automatically. The bulk of Delicious bookmarks already in the archives can help inform an algorithm that does that. Requiring that people bookmark and tag everything is kind of a drag, though, and an unnecessary burden to impose on users. In a world of real-time search and sharing people simply don't go to the trouble of bookmarking links that often, they are easy enough to recall later if they are really important.

   I would happily allow Delicious to automatically bookmark all the links I open and even propose tags for them. How about a subtle little pop-up in the corner of my page that says "page bookmarked and tagged as..." with 2 or 3 tags applied automatically. I can click to remove any bad ones, nuke them all if they are all wrong, or click a button to do it manually and apply my own tags. That would be awesome. If Delicious itself doesn't build that interface, someone else ought to, on top of the API.

3. Mobile saving and reading should be a much bigger part of Delicious than it is. How often do you find yourself on your phone with a few minutes of free time that could be good for reading links you saved back at home? How about finding links on your phone and saving them for later reading when back home? Both of these things happen all the time now - whereas they didn't happen at all when Delicious was born.

Those are a few of my ideas for how Delicious could be saved. I hope the new team can pull it off, however they go about trying. The idea of mass folksonomic categorization of the web, built on the data of casual web activity and served up for subsequent exploration and subscription is a beautiful, beautiful vision.

In many ways "what do you need" is the most basic of questions for a tool to ask a human. Jig applies the best practices of contemporary lightweight social networks to the problem of people filling each others' needs online. It's not fully baked yet, but it's got a team filled with rockstars, a beguiling simplicity to it and it may very well unfold into a compelling service to use. I began testing the service a few months ago but news about it unfolded publicly last night on Techmeme.

How does Jig look so far? Well, it's visually much stronger than Delicious ever was. The user experience is pretty good. The URL structure is clean and predictable, something that makes fabulous things possible over on Delicious.

There are no RSS feeds anywhere, but hopefully that will change. Categorization of questions appears unclear to a number of early users. Network effects remain to be seen but the public nature of the posts seems to lead to a good number of responses. There is a clear need for spam control and moderation, already.

Why use Jig when you've already got Twitter or Facebook on one end of the spectrum and Quora on the other? I think there may prove something uniquely helpful in having the specific need of needs that need filling served on a stand-alone site dedicated to that. I think that's the intention behind Jig.

Will people come back to it regularly? That's the biggest question.

Simple in the Front, Brainy Behind the Scenes

For those unfamiliar, Schachter's big win came from Delicious, a service that let people put their Web bookmarks online, instead of tying them to a single browser on their computer. The user categorization, aggregate discovery and network effects of that service were appreciated by far too few people - especially Yahoo, the company that acquired then neglected it. I love it and still use the heck out of it today. It's now owned by the team that co-founded YouTube, who bought it this year from Yahoo.

Schachter isn't the only big name behind Jig, though. Designer Drew Olbrich came from OnLive and did animation for Batman and Shrek movies. Lawrence Kesteloot came from OnLine too. Developer Samuel Clay came from DocumentCloud, the highly respected tools building organization supported by leading news organizations old and new. Nick Nguyen hails from Mozilla and Delicious. Perhaps the next-best known after Schacter is Paul Rademacher, famous for creating HousingMaps.com, the Web's first great mashup.

Not a team to trifle with. We'll see how the site takes shape and how often people come back to the site.

How hyped was this service? It had backing from former Starbucks Senior VP Don Valencia, former Microsoft Senior VP Richard Fade and Mark Zbikowski, creator of the DOS executable file format (.EXE). Michael Arrington chose it over Delicious as a Web service he couldn't live without and Mashable called it the only other Delicious-type service worth writing a positive review of. I reviewed it in great detail five years ago at TechCrunch. For all that enthusiasm, though, smart features and good design couldn't make BlueDot take off with users.

Two years ago Koss blogged that the company had laid off all employees beyond himself and a part time operations person, but had raised enough money to keep trying for 2+ more years. Two years and one month have now passed.

"As we evolve the Faves.com service, we are looking to be more relevant to users who are increasingly adopting Facebook or Twitter as the primary means of communicating with their friends, family, and co-workers," Koss wrote then. "We are also finding that a large proportion of users of our site are not authentic 'bookmarkers', but rather are creating links to other web sites for marketing, or spam."

It's really a shame that social bookmarking hasn't worked out better than it has - the field has such incredible potential for research - but I have to confess that I rarely bookmark things myself anywhere these days, either.

You should go do that right now, even if you're not a big Delicious user anymore. It takes 30 seconds to do and is something good to do for yourself and for the good of the Web. If you don't, that data will disappear. Philosophically, that's bad because all your "data exhaust" like that is going to become an important currency of the future Web, an important asset whether it seems that way today or not. Practically, though, there are three important reasons why you should go take a moment to make sure that data is preserved.

Here's why you should check that box and opt-in to having your data transferred to the new system.

• To preserve that which is most popular. Just this morning a co-worker asked me where I could find a list of group chat workplace collaboration technologies. Why, at http://delicious.com/popular/chat and http://delicious.com/popular/collaboration of course, I said! It felt good to be able to recommend that again. Let's all make sure that our data gets transferred over to the new system so all those passive votes for the best online resource regarding all our tags get preserved.
See also: Thousands of Reddit Users Donate Their Data to Science
• To preserve the system of classification, the taxonomy, the tags per URL. If I say ReadWriteWeb.com, Delicious says web2.0, blog, technology, news, socialsoftware, trends and many other tags. Let's say I want more of the same. I can visit http://www.delicious.com/tag/socialsoftware+blog, for example (that's all URLs that have been tagged with both socialsoftware and blog), and even subscribe to the RSS feed there. That nice clean URL structure, based on user-generated categorization, is a very valuable resource. All your old bookmarks help categorize the best URLs around the web. Please don't let them die.

• Hopefully new things will be born. The creator of Delicious once told me he ran out of time and support before he could build http://www.delicious.com/popular/socialsoftware+blog (popular with multiple tags). There's far, far more that can be done with semi-structured data resulting from our everyday use of the Web, including bookmarking. Check out The Locker Project, for example.

Hopefully the new owners of Delicious will appreciate the awesome resource for the world that they've bought and help grow it in all the more useful ways. Please take 30 seconds to go opt-in to allowing your public data to be used as the raw material for those systems of classification.

For its part, Yahoo later clarified that "sunsetting" didn't mean "killing." It meant selling. And today we now know who the buyers are: YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

The transition is now underway to move Delicious data to AVOS, and according to an FAQ, the Delicious site will remain up and in its current form until July. Users will be able to opt in to transfer their bookmarks to AVOS or, as always, they can opt to download their data and select an alternative.

Details aren't clear yet on what shape the bookmarking data will take once at AVOS, but Delicious says that that Chen and Hurley's startup will "continue the service that users have come to know and love and by working with the community, make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web's 'tastiest' content."

Delicious was founded in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Hurley and Chen founded YouTube that same year, and sold it to Google eighteen months later.

According to the AVOS press statement (and note, that website is unresponsive due to what's likely a high amount of traffic), "Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They're aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web."

Of course, the wide variety of add-ons and the ability to customize your browser to your liking is one of the things that has long made Firefox an appealing choice. But in a post on its blog, Mozilla reveals some stats from performance-testing. It found that for every add-on you install, you're adding about 10% to the amount of time it takes for Firefox to start-up.

Firefox says it's going to start labeling add-ons that are drags on performance, displaying warnings on those that slow start-up time by more than 25%. In an upcoming version of Firefox, these warnings will be displayed in the Add-ons Manager as well. It also says that in this new version, third party add-ons will not be installed unless the user explicitly allows the installation in Firefox. This will likely cut back on the unwanted toolbars and bundled add-ons that people inadvertently install.

Firefox says it's also reaching out to developers, to help them make sure their code is optimized and that they are building add-ons with best practices in mind.

For users, it's always a good idea to disable - or better yet uninstall - add-ons that you aren't using.

Freelish.us is built on top of Status.net's standards-based software for distributed, federated social networking. Anyone can set up their own implementation, design and community version of Freelish.us and all users can follow people on other implementations of the network. In the future, all installations of Status.net will have the option of launching their own interoperable social bookmarking feature, the company says. Freelish.us will never die, either, because it can live on your own servers, under your own control. That's not something that can be said about Delicious. You don't have to run it on your own server, you can just use the official installation too. You can import your Delicious bookmarks, grab the bookmarklet and get started.

"It's definitely not perfect," Status.net founder Evan Prodromou says, "But we think it's a pretty good start." One thing to note is that you need to click the confirmation link that shows up in your email before your bookmarks will start appearing. The service is rich with potential, built with standards for the future and backed by a company and community focused on the growth of distributed services like this.

I think it's super exciting.

Back in December, we learned that Yahoo was considering closing down Delicious - something that would be a super tragic loss given the incredible things that can be done with the service. Yahoo now says it is looking to sell the service.

There are other alternatives, including Pinboard and Diigo, but Freelishus's emphasis on standards and interoperability mean that it could be the type of service that makes the jump from being a service to being a platform.

It's hard to imagine a better solution to the problem than this. I'm @marshallk on Freelishus, feel free to be my buddy and we can share links.

MyBlogLog was a service with incredible potential that was ahead of its time. It was like Facebook Connect, years before Facebook Connect. It was squandered by Yahoo. It's tragic. Below, an excerpt of our coverage of the service's pending demise a year ago, trying to capture the value it could have delivered.

ReadWriteWeb, December 22nd 2009

Five years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we're hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.

MyBlogLog was a wildly innovative service that grew fast after launching and was acquired in January 2007 by Yahoo! for $10 million. It made a deal with users: Give us your personal information and we'll show you the faces of people who read your blog. That was a compelling offer and the resulting data amassed could have proven invaluable, had Yahoo! chosen to cultivate it and a developer ecosystem around it. That potential was so great, in fact, that sunset for MyBlogLog is downright tragic. It's also likely to anger bloggers all around the web.

In addition to showing the faces of recent blog visitors, MyBlogLog also offered programatic access to activity streams from social networks that users associated with their MyBlogLog accounts. For example, Yahoo's Kent Brewster, now at Netflix, built a bookmarklet that would display the recent bookmarks on Delicious, photos on Flickr and job titles from LinkedIn of the latest MyBlogLog users to visit any given blog.

Yahoo! has let the service atrophy for years and will now put it to rest. To think that this service offered publishers and developers access to personal, demographic, taste and activity data of a website's readers - and yet that offering has in the end gone no where - that's downright crazy.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we scraped a feed from our MyBlogLog page of the new users just added to our community, then reached out to thank them for their support and welcome them personally. That was just the beginning of what could have been a very valuable source of data. Imagine getting a feed of the LinkedIn job titles of all your recent readers and presenting that to a blog's advertisers. Both analytically and financially, there was so much potential in MyBlogLog. See our 2008 post The Significance of the MyBlogLog API if you're a social web geek and want to have your heart broken.

Looking at the ecosystems beginning to form around Twitter, Facebook and other user data - MyBlogLog may just have been ahead of its time. The service isn't alone among potentially world-changing technologies acquired and then starved of support at Yahoo! We've asked Yahoo! for comment and will update this post if we receive any.

We called co-founder Eric Marcoulier for comment and he offered the following perspective: "So much of your company's long term sucess when it's acquired is based on the amount of executive juice it has. The only way it survives and flourishes is if you have an executive champion who promotes it internally. Shortly after we were acquired we were transfered away from our champion and under someone who didn't feel the same way about MyBlogLog. In those circumstances, things simply slow down.
"For any startup that has earn outs, and this didn't affect us, you've got to keep in mind that in 3 months you could be reorganized and the new guy could shut you down. The picture that gets painted early on when you have your product champions can change in a heartbeat and it's important for entreprenuers to consider that when looking at the deal terms."

R.I.P. MyBlogLog.

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