Social bookmarking site Delicious launched a limited, invite-only preview of version 2.0 of the service this afternoon. The new site can be accessed at preview.delicious.com, although only invited users can actually get in.
The Delicious service (no longer “del.icio.us” and now residing at delicious.com) boasts 3 million registered users and 100 million unique URLs bookmarked.
If you are invited, all of your existing bookmarks are imported to the preview, although any changes you make will be lost when the new service launches - so it’s just for trying out and giving feedback. Del.icio.us is saying that there is no guarantee that the final product will look exactly like the preview, since they are taking user feedback very seriously.
The preview shows a substantially different interface than the current Del.icio.us site, and a number of new features.
Founder Joshua Schachter says this is a complete code-rewrite of Del.icio.us. More details below.
New Interface
The interface is broken down into four main categories: Home, Bookmarks, People and Tags. Access to each is via persistent navigation buttons at the top of the site.
New Features
They weren’t kidding about a complete code re-write. And while the point of the new version is to release something far more scalable and agile than the existing product, there are a number of new features. Most of them were highly requested by users. I’m still working through many of them.
There are a number of new sorting options. Instead of sorting bookmarks by how recent or popular they are, you can also sort alphabetically, and reverse sort any of the above. They have also added bulk tag editing (very much needed), and organization and sorting of your network of friends and people you watch.
The preview also includes a new search engine that includes contextual search. You can now search your own bookmarks, all bookmarks or just your network’s bookmarks. If you do not specify what you want, it searches whatever you are currently looking at - your own bookmarks, bookmarks from your network, etc.
As I said, I’m still digesting most of the new features. Schachter says the new code base will allow them to make more frequent updates to the service.
Update: Here are the new features broken down:
Navigation
The navigation bar is now organized into Bookmarks, People, and Tags. The tags section features a new MyTags page where you can see all of your tags in an expanded cloud. On the bar, you can search bookmarks amongst your own, networks, everyone’s, or the set you’re currently looking at.
Tag Bar
The tag bar features tagging auto complete and sorting alphabetically, by date, and popularity.
Bookmarks
The bookmark summary can adjust the view detail, so you can either get more or less info with a single click. Also, the popularity of a bookmark can be determined quickly by the width and shade of the blue box around the save count. In addition to a complete history of everyone’s bookmarks for that web page, you can now see who in your network has saved the page.
Side Bar
The side bar lets you easily see a person’s list of top tags. You can also refine your view of bookmarks to specific categories as well. You can also give members in your network nicknames.
Action Box
The action box provides you with a list of commonly used actions for the current page.
Look great! Good work delicious team!
i was dreaming for importing delicious bookmarks to firefox and because firefox drag and drop bookmark feature is very simple and easy to use.
any news on that?
and any way do get invitation?
I love the service as is already. Updates are always nice although personally I find nothing exciting about this release.
That aside, I’m really disappointed to hear they’re dropping the “del.icio.us” name. The whole “Domain name 2.0″ craze was essentially invented when Joshua registered del.icio.us. How could they possibly push that aside? “Delicious.com” is boring as hell
Looks nice - but does it save a copy of the bookmarked site as furl and diigo do? If not, it’ll remain useless for me.
Wow. It sure looks like a monster departure from their current interface. It’s going to take some time to get used to, especially for power users. I’m hoping they keep it as easy to operate as it is now.
Hi
I need you one invitation for previuw del.icio.us ver.20
Thank You
Alvaro Castillo
afce@utpl.edu.ec
I use del.icio.us extensively to bookmark web designs i come across.
it would be great to have thumbnails next to the websites so i can see where im headed , instead of having to click and wait.
Very cool, nice scoop. I’m looking forward to see if they have improved their blog integration options, I like to power my blogroll using delicious, but right now it’s a bit of a hack to say the least.
Did del.icio.us pay for delicious.com after the site got extremely popular, if so, does anyone know how much?
Is there an API to query delicious? I would like to send it a webpage and category and have it return all the links in that category from people that have also labeled that page. That way I can find similar sites from people that are looking at the same pages I am.
does look good
I really hope no 3rd party services built on top of del.icio.us are broken by the complete rewrite. Other hopes and dreams include personal cached copies of pages, as was mentioned above, and a kick-ass recommendation engine. Recommendation will be where the most value will come from, at least for me. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, perhaps for the future.
Caching the page is on the todo list but won’t be part of this release, as is thumbnails.
A recommendation engine is something I want to have again and something we will make time for. I wrote the original Delicious recommendation engine but it didn’t really scale as the site got larger and larger.
There will be a new version of the API after we get this out the door, but the API is not changing at this time.
I decided to move to delicious.com because del.icio.us was just too hard for lots of people to get their heads around. A large chunk of folks don’t even know how to pronounce it…
Josh, will the site still be available via del.icio.us, as well as delicious.com?
“Did del.icio.us pay for delicious.com after the site got extremely popular, if so, does anyone know how much?
Uh no, they looked for it on godaddy.com and found that no one had ever registered it.
Stephen — We’ll do some redirect magic and make sure every link continues to work.
I’m very curious how much it cost to acquire delicious.com
zzzzzzzz
Does anyone but techies use this thing?
Mikew…that’s an interesting question and as a guess I’d say if the mainstream web users aren’t using this tool yet, they eventually will - or some variant of it. It’s just too useful of a tool to ignore for too long.
I’ve got a degree in Computer Science. I played with in within weeks of launch, found it thoroughly confusing (including the pretentious URL), and never tried it again.
Visiting the home page right now, I can tell you that my wife, my father, my mother, and every other non-techie that I know could never use this damn thing. Layers upon layers upon layers of assumed technical knowledge and other cruft.
Their new logo looks like the Edelman logo!
It no longer look as delicious as before. More like nice to have, but not must have.
“…it would be great to have thumbnails next to the websites so i can see where im headed , instead of having to click and wait.”
The new Yahoo! Bookmarks (which I have been told shares the same underpinnings as the new Delicious.com - hate the name change, BTW) has this feature. Why this doesn’t have it, I don’t know - clearly, it’s possible - look at the existing main page!
So, uh, how do the rest of us sign up for the beta?
This looks pretty nice, but I’m also not a huge Del.icio.us user at the moment.
I wish the keep the del.icio.us. The interface looks interesting. Since I am primarily a Firefox del.icio.us addon user, I haven’t visited the site too often in recent months. This change might tempt me to do that on occasion. We’ll see.
I’ve got to say, I am computer ILLITERATE, and I use Delicious daily, and I find Delicious indispensable. It’s not that hard. Actually, it’s very simple and very useful. It does lots, so it looks like a lot. Come on, tech junkies. If I can do it, so can you (and your mother and your father and your dog).
when 2 and 2 got together, it became 4. Likewise, when deli.cio.us got together they become delicious. It’s a lovely website with 100 million page views. I don’t get one thing, there has been tonnes of social networking but what’s the real use of it. I understand the wave with all social networking sites.
But really where does it lead to - all of them do the same thing. I am yet to come to have a compelling reason to join these sites. It’s one thing to try it out but it’s another to have a real revenue source. How could you make much money with all of it.
I think we are missing the beat and focusing on social networking sites, basically what we should concentrate on is sites that have real revenue or atleast addictive enough to stick on to it.
I write this big comment because i want michael to respond to it. As my name says “THINKER”
Mike, any word of a mobile version of the site?
I know there are a couple neat URLs you can use like:
http://del.icio.us/html/ideadu.....sbutton=no
(Thanks to the dude from here:
http://www.webpronews.com/blog.....ous-mobile)
But if you want something with a few more features, you can try out our site at http://mobilicio.us.
I really thought that we would have buried Mobilicio.us by now, but it seems there is still a place for it. The best feature is that we pass the bookmarks through Google Mobile to reformat pages for a smaller screen. Other than that, it adds searching capabilities and a way to organize things using the “mtag” tag.
Anyone that performs any type of daily research on technolgy or competitive sector studies uses delicious. I was an early (maybe later than I think) adopter, and it changed the way I do business for my clients. Now I keep research partners and clients up to date with the for:mrclient tag.
Keeping bookmarks in the browser was a clumsy and inelegant way to organize and share critical web research.
Thanks Josh, you have created a true boon for us web content researchers.
Love the new design, but I hate the Popular Bookmarks and Explore Tags tab design. They throw off the entire rectangular look.
And the face on the individual’s bookmark page? They could’ve done better there.
Finally, the random “What’s New” green box? I guess they just wanted it to stand out so they picked green.
Otherwise I am psyched to play with the new design, seems like it will be more functional.
Looks nice. I hope it will be fast like current one.
awesome work by the Del.icio.us team. Now give me an invite!
Caching a copy of the website is very important to me as well. Diigo already does that. I am assured that even if the site goes down or is taken down, I will have access to the website that I bookmarked.
This is the primary reason I have been a Diigo user and never embraced Deli.icio.us despite all the exposure that it gets.
Please give us caching feature!
Awesome work. I was long thinking to bundle my bookmarks and reorganized them. Thanks God I have waited now i will do on newer version. Send me an invite at irfanazher@gmail.com
Great news!, I just hope to get thumbnails for all bookmarks, not only on the first page but on the following ones and ofcourse to my saves bookmarks. Looking forward to this public release.
Can someone send me an invitation for new delicious?
Thanks a lot!
Meh. As a long-time user of 1.0, I don’t see the value. Just a (much) busier interface. Thanks for the sneak peek though.
looks cools..
please send me an invitation..
Here are two things I REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT:
1) Is there a button I can push to make sure that all the URLs I have bookmarked are for private use only.
2) When I save a URL privately, the tags that I saved when I save the private URL do not show up when I went to save another URL. As a result, it kind of forces me to save it in public mode.
Please Joshua, please make this happen. I love delicious but this these two really really important features would be delicious.
more delicious than the current version! great job
“i was dreaming for importing delicious bookmarks to firefox and because firefox drag and drop bookmark feature is very simple and easy to use.”
Many people have been doing that for months. There is a Del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for Firefox. Just go to the Firefox addons page and search for Delicious ou Del.icio.us.
But beware, when I import my FF bookmarks into Delicious, I got a strange feeling with the tags. But I got used to the new system
sweet.
I just wrote about how del.icio.us is the amazon for the internet:
http://www.michaelhoover.org/m.....is-th.html
they could p0wn the search space, since they have 100 million human edited and ranked urls representing the best stuff out there. recommendation engine in a box. peoplerank fer sure dudes.
Is it just me or does it look like they are copying Mag.nolia?
Seems to be great and functionaly.
Congrats to the team for the new release. I have begun to use delicious as not only my bookmarking tool but also as one of my primary search engines. I would love to see the team focus some energy on exposing the power of delicious in this regard.
The second aspect that seems to be overlooked is the social/community side of the site, I would enjoy being able to at least view additional contact information about my network (I don’t know 90% of the people on it) and also implementing something like a discussion/note board for specific tags and links.
It looks as if there is a new “Friend” feature so maybe this contains some added depth in this arena.
Does anyone else feel that there is a ton of untapped potential lurking here? its almost as if Yahoo and Co are afraid to rock the boat on such a great product, but in my opinion are missing out on something the site contains that is much much bigger.
Organizing bookmarks is too time consuming, I’ll never go there. I have better things to do, like scan Techmeme for interesting headlines.
Looks very good and eye candy.
Long wait is finally over. Thank you delicious.
Hmm. Tasty. But now I have to dart my tired overworked eyballs all the way to the right to look at the item-level tags.