Delicious 2.0 Launches. Really. It Totally Launched.

YAY! The long awaited, much promised, never delivered Delicious 2.0 will launch in the next few minutes, just like they promised again last week.

The new Delicious is just like the old Delicious, except for the way it looks. They’re also promising that it will be “faster, easier to learn,” and “hopefully more desirable.”

Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.

Users will need to log into their accounts and get a new browser cookie. Honestly, I rarely visit Delicious any more, the Firefox plugin is so good that actually visiting the site isn’t necessary. So all I’m really hoping for here is a stable service. If there are glitches, I hope they fix them quickly.

As I said in our previous posts, it’s too bad Delicious 2.0 couldn’t launch before founder Joshua Schachter left the company in frustration. I called Schachter to ask him what he has to say about the new launch. His response – “Good luck. I hope it goes well.”