Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo bought it in 2005. But it’s weird now to even think about it as a social site, I get more of the utilitarian vibe from it these days. People still use it, but it’s more of a repository. Or, to put it another way, it’s where links go to die.
Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive. And that’s what Yahoo wants to tap into now, with another revamping of Delicious. And not surprisingly, this revamp is very Twitter-centric.
The biggest difference is that the main Delicious homepage is now an area called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Previously, the main page contained the most popular bookmarked pages on the site, but that is now relagated to the second tab. This redesign is all about freshness, which is to say real-time-ness. Delicious looks at and refreshes this list of links every minute or so based on what people are bookmarking and what they’re tweeting. This model, while flawed (I’ll get to that), does make the main page of Delicious more interesting.
“Design” is the most popular tag on Delicious, according to Yahoo, and that meant a “Popular Bookmarks” area that was dominated by things like “200+ Paper Brushes For Photoshop.” For some people, that is useful, but for at least just as many, those types of links are not useful in the least bit. The redesign is an effort to move away from that.
One problem I see with this Fresh Bookmarks area is that the tweets it uses in its equation, often don’t have anything to do with the content being linked to. Yahoo did this on purpose, noting that some 81% of tweets don’t contain URLs, and they still wanted to use data from the most amount of tweets to populate this area. So instead they use keywords in tweets, but this often results in tweets populated below the shared content that have absolutely nothing to do with it.
And on top of this new Fresh Bookmarks area, when you bookmark things, Delicious now allows you to also tweet your links out at the same time. This should be useful to people who want to save stuff for later, but also want to let others know about it. You can also easily email links to people, and send them to your Delicious contacts. This is all done through the bookmarklet.
And the search aspect of Delcious has been completely revamped as well, making it easier for power users to dig through things they’ve bookmarked in the past. The new search area also features rich content, so if someone shares a YouTube video, you can play it inline. The same is true with Flickr images.
All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Delicious has long just been about saving links and not about sharing them like many of the new, more versatile social sharing services out there. If Yahoo wanted to tie the product into Twitter, it should have done that months ago, to get ahead of the curve, rather than at the back of it.
The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious.
And on the bookmarking side of things, the trend seems to be towards simple. Mike likes a service called Pinboard, I’ve long been a fan of Instapaper. Both require less effort to use than Delicious, and are quicker.
But you don’t have to take our word for the downsides of this new Twitterification of Delicious, just listen to its founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google). He’s not even waiting for the embargo to lift on these new changes, he’s just ripping them left and right. First, he notes:
I can’t BELIEVE delicious delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own. sigh
But later he completely rips the new feature:
i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal.
Well, at least he likes the new search, I guess.
Schachter has always been the kind of person to say exactly what he thinks about something, which is most of the reason I like him so much.
Thanks, Mike. It probably gets me into trouble more often than not.
FYI, it looks like your RSS feed is pointing to staging.techcrunch.com
We have been showing “related tweets” for a while on Searchles, and I think we do a better job. We actually use a widget to do it (Tweetle), so it’s portable. I think in theory it is a good idea, but it is a hard thing to get right (especially without access to the fire hose).
Here is an example on Searchles: http://searchle...s%2Ftoday-green
To be fair, del.icio.us’s own “social network” didn’t get very far. Some people use it in anger but there are plenty of old hands who don’t – I’ve been on there since 2004 and I have a handful of people I monitor but.. it’s not really sticky enough to be useful, and I’m not sure it ever could be.
It’s probably a good thing del.icio.us (sorry, I can’t sign up for this “Delicious.com” nonsense) are standing on the shoulders of other social networks a bit – their own is impotent (and I say this as a major fan and once evangelist of del.icio.us).
Peter – of course. It would have gotten a lot further if it had actually had some supporting features added to it.
Of course it wasn’t a full social network (and was never meant to be), but it would have been more interesting and useful.
I really wanted to see notes from my network in with my bookmarks and when I save or examine URLs. This would have been good.
It’s a Mixed bag, mkay?
I still use delicious, but only because its a convenient way to keep my latest bookmarks on my blog.
Now Yahoo is outsourcing it’s search index, will it have any use for a service like this? I always thought it would use bookmark data as in indicator in it’s algo somewhere along the line…
I clicked on the Pinboard link, and wound up in hell. It wanted me to type in a password to a server, and would not let me cancel. I had to click cancel like 500 times.
delicious never caught on for me. links have a half-life of maybe 2 weeks.
I think that is right decision, every site which integrates with twitter makes a right decision, it’s too hot right now to ignore it.
Yes, please correct the point to staging.techcrunch.com. I clicked a link and was prompted by about 10,000 HTTP authentication boxes. I had to do a quick click on cancel and then a CMD+W to close the page to get out of the deadly loop.
this is great.. they should ad more links from other blogging sites too!!!
I like it
I am long time Delicious user and while mildly interesting what the founder who no longer works on the product says, lets recall that is one customer. If your Delicious trying to plan products based on one customer you will fail.
MG raises a fair point here
“All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.”
For many years Delicious never evolved quickly enough and so it finds itself in a tough spot trying to innovate after years where people like me got used to the product never changing.
The fresh homepage is very cool. I am not a designer type and used to find the homepage overwhelmed by Photoshop stuff. Also could also see myself using the send to email feature every so often.
Michael: perhaps I am just one user. But in the past the things that I’ve wanted to do have been a very good guide and has tended to be what users do actually want.
I just think the front page is useless. It’s hardly used, though.
I stopped using delicious when he left yahoo, but as a developer, I’m somewhat nervous what a big company would do with my idea. Doesn’t seem worth it anymore to sell out, al la ‘Dodgeball’. Maybe I’m wrong.
That fear only seems to be growing larger with time as big companies f-up a lot of these companies.
Want simple? Use Simpy! Yes, it’s still up and running and it was one of the first services TechCrunch profiled back in…. 2004?
http://www.simpy.com/ is the URL
Awesome… I have been looking for something like this!
Works great.
I love the new Homepage and being able to share via Twitter is awesome. Hopefully they’ll add Facebook and FriendFeed support too.
lol, have you compared the related tags on the Delicious search result page for “Bush” and “Obama”?
I am still a del.icio.us user and find the service useful for bookmarking. Using tags, I can quickly find old bookmarks, since I usually remember which tags I used.
I’ve seen people get over bad relationships faster than poor Josh here.
“Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet.”
Social sites are like trendy clubs: they go from the hottest ticket in town to having a “for lease” sign on their windows.
Right now, I like using bit.ly. The bit.ly Sidebar is particularly convenient for sharing on Twitter. When Twitter eventually goes under, I’ll find something else.
instapaper=simplicity=brilliance. Maybe some start ups could learn a thing or two from that equation.
I agree. And I’ve written about that very thing.
http://www.tech...-simple-stupid/
The “to read later” utility is something that is also heavily used in delicious.
Pinboard explicitly built this in. Instapaper is entirely designed for it.
I’d been pushing for explicit support – there was some code for it in D1 but we had to put that on hold for the glacially developed D2.
I must be in the minority. I want a fast, elegant system to read news feeds (NetNewsWire), bookmark categorized stories (Delicious), format for reading later (Instapaper), and share with people (Tweetie) — in one app.
So why exactly does Yahoo need to ask for and store my Twitter password?
Seriously. OAuth would have been the right way to go here.
Especially given all the problems delicious had with other people collecting its user’s passwords. Follow the golden rule.
I cannot believe Delicious have just released this Twitter integration WITHOUT OAuth! There really is no excuse. This is a serious issue! Shocked.
Rant over.
sorry, don’t care.
It might have been better for them to introduce twitter as a ranking signal without exposing the source data. While the raw data from twitter is confusing for users- the links themselves seem “fresher”, which is the stated intent.
too bad they don’t have an RSS Feed for the Fresh bookmarks. I tried creating one too, but it’s not working
I rather have the previous version. I’m not a social media maniac to take of bookmarking and broadcasting at the same time. Plus it seems the shortcut for opening bookmarks in new tab is gone. Ahhh
I’m looking forward to a good free del.icio.us replacement, with a default hosted installation (see laconi.ca / identi.ca). I wonder if the new Ma.gnolia is going to fit that bill…
http://autonomo...us_replacements
“Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive.”
For me and as with many others, one of Twitter’s many uses is that it is a great web-based bookmarking tool that has replaced Delicious in many ways but not totally. A greater proportion of links shared on twitter do not get re-tweeted or re-shared, as they are archived for future reference.
Like delicious, Twitter is the new social media fad. I wonder how long they are going to last before the ‘next’ big thing comes around to take its place.
I’ve never understood the password policy on delicious. It’s required to be stronger than my bank-account, and the cookie only stays a few days. It’s a bookmark site! The point is to keep me signed in… Plus, it really seems like I should be able to use my Y! account or perhaps my Y! open-id.
Testing comments. Delicious is dead to me.
JS-KIT Echo testing
Thanks. great information.
Twitter is a worthless piece of crap fad used primarily by spammers and people that want you to know what they had for lunch. I guarantee that two years from now, people will be saying “Remember Twitter? Yeah, why the @#$% did we ever use it and what was it for?”