bookmarking

Back to Beta: Delicious Returns With a New Design and Focus

Frederic Lardinois

Sep 27, 2011 — 2 min read

Delicious, the venerable Web 2.0 social bookmarking site once known as del.icio.us, debuted its new design and feature set today. After its sale to Yahoo, the site lingered in extended hibernation for years, but it was finally acquired by the YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen earlier this year. The two promised to restore Delicious to its former glory and to start adding new features soon. Today, Delicious is launching its new design which favors large, bold images over the text-centric view of the previous design. In the best tradition of Web 2.0 sites, it is also calling the service, which has been online since 2003, a ‘beta.’

As for new features, Delicious is now offering its users the ability to curate ‘stacks’ of links. These are lists of links to sites, photos and/or videos that you can then share with others one the service (or the rest of the Web, of course). Delicious calls them “playlists for the Web.” You can also follow stacks from other users.

Familiar Design + A Few New Features = A Good Start of the New Delicious

While the new owners obviously made some changes to the overall design, the general feel of the site will still feel very familiar to those who used Delicious in the past. The blue and white color scheme, for example, is still there. Some of the other changes are minor, but point toward the general direction the new owners are planning to take the site: the navigation has been simplified, bookmarks are now called links, and users can set profile pictures. The new owners also promise to make the site more social than ever before.

At the same time, it’s also important to note that all the tools in the Delicious ecosystem (browser extensions, bookmarklets etc.) and the service’s API will continue to work.

Some Problems

There are some issues with the new site, though. There are, for example, no RSS feeds anymore that you could subscribe to. Those users who forgot to opt-in to transfer their bookmarks to the new site by logging in over the last few weeks will now also come to the site and realize that their login credentials won’t work anymore and that all of their old bookmarks are gone.

Overall though, it feels as if the new Delicious is off to a good start. The new homepage looks far more inviting than the original one and the focus seems to be shifting more toward discovery than just the basic Web 2.0 staple of bookmarking and tagging sites.

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