When we intially wrote about the service (remember, very early on in the realtime search phenomenon), we noted that the presentation of results was impressive, but the results themselves were utterly dominated by Twitter. That really shouldn’t have been all that surprising considering Twitter’s popularity in the space. But the service has since added some new features to make it more robust.

You’ll notice that when you do a search, there is a clean, two-column layout. On the left, popular shared items appear. These can be links shared on Twitter, Digg items, etc. You can also filter this content by videos, links, and images. On the right, you’ll see the live-updating items from around the web. The majority are still coming in from Twitter, but there are plenty of results from places like Delicious and Digg mixed in as well. These two columns have been swapped since when we first covered the service, and the “Your Searches” column has been removed and place in the top bar.

More importantly, Scoopler has added an entirely new top area to break searches up into categories. Scoopler is calling the feature “Realtime Channels,” and co-founder AJ Asver describes it as, “like Digg’s categories but updated in realtime. They show the hottest tweets, links, videos and images in News, Business, Technology, Politics etc.  The idea is to drive more search queries by suggesting what people should search for.”

Makes sense. And the results are pretty solid. For example, I just clicked on the Entertainment channel and I see the live posts are being populated with talk about things like the new Michael Jackson movie and also the new Avatar trailer. There is also a constantly updating area along the top of the page to show you the hottest topics being talked about in realtime around the web.

But perhaps the best feature of Scoopler remains the “peek” option. This allows you to quickly see the content being linked to through tweets and Digg results in an overlay without having to leave Scoopler. The service also has little picture thumbnails that get inserted into the stream for things like Flickr pictures.

Scoopler’s seed round has attracted investors such as Ron Conway, (Bebo co-founder) Michael Birch, Avalon Ventures, and XG Ventures. Though the amount of the round wasn’t officially disclosed, we hear it’s in the $500,000 to $1 million range.

Speaking of realtime, don’t forget our second Realtime CrunchUp taking place on November 20.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The idea is simple, take tweets and thread them together to form conversations, adding context. This works by using the a tiny thread site to both start new conversation threads, and add your comments to old ones. After authenticating via OAuth, your comment is then sent back to Twitter, with a link back to the a tiny thread conversation page.

The site’s look is sparse (not entirely unlike early Delicious), but it’s very easy to follow conversations. You can see a good example thread here. Right now, the threads only go one level deep, so it actually very much resembles a FriendFeed comment section. FriendFeed, was of course just bought today by Facebook, and its future is uncertain.

Other sites have attempted to thread tweets together in the past, but the results vary because of things like retweets that either break threads or add too much noise. Right now, it appears you can only add to these a tiny thread conversations on the site itself, so it works pretty well. But when you send the tweet back to Twitter, it just reads, “I joined a thread: is this thing on?” followed by a link to a tiny thread. It might be more interesting if it said what you actually said in the thread, enticing people to click on the link to read the full context.

It would seem that Schachter, who has been tweeting out links to this for about the past hour or so, did this on his own time, rather than his Google 20% time. Again, it’s extremely simple, but kind of interesting — especially in a post-FriendFeed acquisition world.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Delicious

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

I’ve been a long time Delicious user for bookmarks, going back to way before the acquisition of the company by Yahoo in late 2005 (one of our early scoops). But over the years I’ve used it less and less. It’s slow, sometimes offline. A couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t let me log in, saying my password was incorrect. I was sure it was right, but I requested a password reset anyway. The email never came.

The service has languished, and has the feel of a product that’s on life support. There doesn’t seem to be a passionate group of developers loving and caring for the product and making it better over time. Or at least not worse. Traffic is stagnating or dropping, depending on which analytics service you look at. Founder Joshua Schachter left long ago in frustration, and is now at Google.

All Delicious really needs to do is let me bookmark sites without a lot of distraction. It hasn’t been good at that for a long, long while.

Something about a new service called Pinboard is really captivating to me. It’s not even a startup – it’s a side project by a developer, Maciej Ceglowski. Ceglowski is a former Yahoo Brickhouse engineer and has also designed and built an internal data warehouse for Twitter as an independent contractor.

The service, which is in private beta, doesn’t have many bells and whistles. Which is exactly what I want. Bookmarklets let me set bookmarks via a popup or redirect, with fields for tags and description and a privacy toggle. You can also bookmark a page “to read” which populates a separate list. It’s not for permanent bookmarks, just a reminder to read something later.

No graphics. no design. just easy, easy bookmarking and tagging. I love it. It reminds me of Delicious back in 2005, when I loved that site, too.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Every news source has its bias, and that is especially true for political news. The same story on the Huffington Post is more likely to have a liberal slant than something on Fox News. Most people figure out which news sources share political views and settle on a few which make them feel comfortable. For those who have trouble identifying left from right, there is now FairSpin, a site that looks like it just launched today.

FairSpin takes the most buzzed about news stories from memeorandum (the sister site to Techmeme, but for politics), and lays them out on a page literally from left to right. The Huffington Post, Talking Points memo, and Washington Monthly stories are on the left. The Washington post and New York Times stories are in the middle. And the Wall Street Journal Op-ed and Fox News stories are on the right.

If you don’t agree with this pacement, then you can vote on any story, indicating whether you think it’s bias is left-leaning, right-leaning, or “fair.” (I am not sure whether a neutral leaning is more fair than any other, or simply wishy-washy). When you click through to a story, it presents it under a toolbar (yes, yet another frame) with its own shortened URL, which lets you cast your vote and return easily to FairSpin. For instance, this link http://fairspin.org/read/5093 takes you to a Michelle Malkin post. (This doesn’t work for New York Times articles, however, because it has disabled such toolbars and non-redirecting URL shorteners after the whole Diggbar controversy).

FairSpin shows you your voting history, as well as the community’s, and allows you to hide “highly-biased” stories. It neatly lays out visually what many readers already know, but is a helpful filter nonetheless. Just ignore the side which offends you the most.

The site was developed by Stephen Hood, who until recently ran Delicious for Yahoo, and Dave Baggeroer, a designer. You can read more about it on their blog.

Stephen Hood most recently ran the social bookmarking service Delicious at Yahoo. Based on this experience Stephen is a big believer in the power of the community to organize information and accomplish goals, and sees an opportunity to mobilize readers to identify bias in the news. Dave Baggeroer

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Either way, Diigo has now bought a service that in many ways can be compared to its own product. Both offer a way for website visitors to save entire web pages or just parts as well as annotate and share with others what they consider interesting on the web. Diigo doesn’t refer to its service as social bookmarking but rather as a research and knowledge-sharing tool, but in reality it isn’t all that different from Delicious and the likes, including Furl. You might as well say Diigo bought a rival as it is readying the launch of the upcoming Diigo 4.0 platform, which is said to be taking social bookmarking and annotation ‘to new heights’.

Furl, besides being one of the very first web services profiled by Mike Arrington when he started TechCrunch, was acquired by LookSmart back in September 2004. Although it was one of the first startups to focus on leveraging new technologies to add a social layer to site bookmarking, it never really quite took off the way Delicious did and according to the press release attracted only 1 million users for its service since its inception 6 years ago.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.

As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Animoto

Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.

Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.

Digg

Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Facebook

I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.

Gmail

I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.

Google Reader

Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.

Hulu

Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.

iPhone 3G

The first gadget I’ve included over the years – the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.

MySpace Music

MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.

Pandora

Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.

Scribd & Docstoc

We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.

TechMeme

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.

Wordpress

We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Yammer

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

YouTube

YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger), Ghost Hack Beauty, Mario Bruggemann

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Social bookmarking pioneer Delicious (they recently turned five years old) pushed out a couple of updates to its Internet Explorer and Firefox add-ons yesterday, fixing a couple of bugs and adding some features. But it looks like Delicious has also integrated a useful feature they didn’t mention in the blog post announcing the updates: a brand new audio player to play your MP3 bookmarks inside the browser.

TechCrunch reader Nicola D’Agostino spotted the new media player quickly, and he subsequently got a confirmation from a community manager of the Delicious team in the comments of the company blog post, adding that they’ll talk more about it soon.

Update: they’ve now blogged about the new media player on the Delicious blog as well as the Yahoo! Music blog. As our previous update below already suggested, the media player is in fact Yahoo’s FoxyPlayer. By using the “system:media:audio” tag, you can filter most views on Delicious to look for playable audio files. Enjoy.

I just tried it out, and while it’s not a groundbreaking feature, it’s a welcome addition for people who are used to bookmarking and tagging MP3 files with Delicious. The audio player, which pops up in a subtle horizontal bar, sports back/forward buttons, an integration with Yahoo! Search, a timer and a playlist.

Update: a trackback from the blog of former GM of Yahoo! Music Ian Rogers teaches us a little more about the background of the player, which is fact the Yahoo! Mediaplayer.

It’s very cool in that it is a single line of javascript and reads simple, easy to author, HTML on the page to create the play buttons. The page author needs only add the single line of javascript, then wrap an MP3 link in an href and voila, you have an inline player.

Note that the latest Foxytunes player also inserts this player in the page in a Greasemonkey sort of way. Very very handy.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Delicious, the social bookmarking site that was largely responsible for making ‘tagging’ one of the defining elements in today’s web, has turned 5. The site launched back in 2003 and was one of the first companies to be profiled on TechCrunch. In December 2005 the site had its big payday when it was acquired by Yahoo, and has racked up 5.3 million users since launch.

The last year has been rough for delicious. In September 2007, we got a sneak peek at Delicious 2.0, a complete-code rewrite of the site that was due to introduce a more intuitive interface and some new features. In January this year there were hints on the Delicious blog that the release was imminent, but nothing materialized. By June – a full 9 months after our initial preview – Delicious 2.0 was still nowhere to be seen.

A week later delicious founder Joshua Schachter resigned from Yahoo, explaining that he had been largely sidelined by management. Finally, in July 2008, Delicious finally released the overhaul. As we’ve noted before, it’s a shame Schachter wasn’t around for the launch.

Now that Delicious 2.0 is finally out the door, here’s to hoping the company can correct its management issues and keep going strong, even without its founder at the helm. For more check out Yahoo’s announcement and the delicious blog.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Here’s an example save of the TechCrunch site I created earlier this evening. Saved pages can also be embedded via an iFrame.

The page save is done via a browser plugin. Until today Iterasi only worked on Windows machines via IE or Firefox. Today the site expanded to Mac machines (Firefox only), opening up the service to new non-Windows users. More importantly, they also added scheduling.

Prior to today users had to manually bookmark a site. Great for a one-off, but if you want to scroll back and view how a site changed over time you had to remember to go there periodically to set a save.

Not any more. Users can now schedule automatic saves of sites as often as daily and add them to folders, tag them, sort by date, etc. Also, all pages are fully indexed and searchable.

Iterasi is completely free, although founder Pete Grillo says they may add a premium option down the road.

On the downside: There is no way to auto-set all saved pages associated with an account to private, although each save has a privacy setting. Since the default is public and the page saved is dynamically generated via sign on and cookies, some private data can be exposed (hit save when you are on an open Gmail page and all your email headlines are public if you forget to set it private).

Also, for a number of reasons Iterasi does all the bookmarking on the user computer, meaning scheduled saves only occur if your computer is on. If not, Iterasi takes the bookmark when you next turn your computer on. Users who don’t leave their computer on regularly won’t fully appreciate the service.

Overall Iterasi is an excellent service, and the schedule feature makes it a must have research tool.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

It is a pretty obvious feature, and there is no reason why del.icio.us, which is owned by Yahoo, can’t do this itself. And perhaps it was simply a design decision. You could argue that searching only through tags, titles, and descriptions returns better results because all of the words in those elements are essentially explicit, higher-level categorizations of the content being bookmarked. And the nice thing about searching on del.cio.us is that you can get results for everyone’s bookmarks, not just your own.

But by searching the actual text of the pages themselves, you can catch keywords that were not captured elsewhere. And in this case, more results are better, because any one person’s set of bookmarks is going to be a relatively limited set of pages.

The problem with Del.izzy is that it doesn’t search the tags, titles, or descriptions. It only searches the text of the underlying pages. What you want is a bookmark search that does both.

A search for “video advertising,” for instance, turned up the same top result, but the rest were all different (see screen shots below). Are the Del.izzy results better? Not really. But they show you what you is missing from a standard del.icio.us search.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.”

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Last month we called on Yahoo to provide guidance on when we might see the new version of the service. In a blog post today, the Delicious team says to get ready for the new version, it’s “almost ready.”

We heard this all before. In January the Delicious blog strongly suggested a launch was imminent, but it never came. We heard from sources inside the company that the issue was an inability to scale the product properly. Some team members suggested caching of bookmark data to reduce the load on the database servers. Others thought a fresh set of database queries were needed every time a user pulled up a page on Delicious. Since that page lists every tag they’ve ever used, the site crawled.

It’s unlikely the team would head fake us again with a blog post unless they were really sure it was time to turn on Delicious 2.0 for everyone. It’s just too bad that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left the company before he was able to see it go live.

More screen shots of Delicious 2.0 are here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Yahoo never said when they’d be ready to launch the new Delicious (it’s available at preview.delicious.com but beta invitations are locked down). In January there was a hint on the Delicious blog that the new version was coming soon: “We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious. We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.” But no update came, and since then, not a peep from Yahoo.

It’s now been nine months. We’ve heard from Yahoo insiders that founder Joshua Schachter is now working on another project, and now that his stock has fully vested it isn’t even certain he’ll stay with the company. Meanwhile, scaling issues have confounded the Delicious team and they continue to rework the architecture.

In April venture capitalist/blogger Fred Wilson noted that the user numbers for Delicious were dropping. Schachter told us that the Comscore numbers did not reflect their business, saying they continue to “grow normally.” He also pointed out that a large number of people use the service via Firefox and other browser plugins, and that the service shut off search indexing, hurting unique traffic numbers.

Delicious is still my social bookmarking service of choice, but Delicious 2.0 is a serious black eye for Yahoo and the Delicious team. It’s time for them to update us on when we can expect a general release of the next version.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Bookmarking and tagging websites can be a messy business. Zigtag, a new sidebar-based plugin currently in private beta, is looking to offer clean and streamlined bookmarking and tagging. The plugin differentiates itself from the multitude of other tagging services by introducing a semantic dictionary of over two million tags. The basic idea: each tag will be defined, and that synonymous tags (say, New York City and Big Apple) will be linked together automatically. That should make finding your bookmarks easier later on.

After entering an appropriate tag for a page, the user is presented with a list of matching keywords, each of which has been defined in Zigtag’s database. For example, after entering “Apple” into the search field, I was able to choose from “the computer company”, “the pomaceous fruit”, and “the record company”, among others. The process is painless and the integrated dictionary is fairly comprehensive. If you happen to stumble across a term that isn’t defined, you can easily request to have it added to the dictionary (and can place your own temporary tag).

Besides the tagging functionality, Zigtag also offers a Digg-like thumbs up/down system, which influences a list of popular bookmarked sites on the Zigtag homepage. The site also has some basic social networking features, allowing for group-specific privacy settings and sharing with friends. There are a number of other handy features, including “Share Page” that lets you send snippets of images and text on a page to friends through email.

My experience with Zigtag was promising, but the plugin still needs some work. Using the sidebar can be pretty unintuitive, especially when you’re searching for something using multiple tags. And many of the synonyms I tried weren’t in the database yet (No mention of Bruce Springsteen for “The Boss”).

Zigtag’s biggest obstacle is the slew of other social bookmarking sites already available (Delicious, Diigo, and Twine, to name a few). The semantic tagging feature is fairly unique, but its appeal is still untested, especially against automated semantic taggers like Twine. Frankly, a lot of people are just going to stick with the simple but effective Delicious interface.

For those looking to try out Zigtag (Firefox only for now), you can grab one of 500 invites here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Earlier today, venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post expressing concern that Web startups tend to languish after they are bought by big companies. To help make his point, Wilson reproduced the comScore chart above, which suggests that the number of people visiting the bookmarking service del.icio.us, which is owned by Yahoo, has dropped off considerably over the past nine months. Wilson was an investor in del.icio.us and profited from its sale to Yahoo in December, 2005. Yet he still laments its apparent struggles under Yahoo’s ownership.

But how bad is del.icio.us struggling really? Yahoo execs always point to it as an internal success story. We asked founder Joshua Schachter, who still runs the service as a Yahoo employee. Despite the stats bandied about by his former investor, Schachter responded by e-mail:

We continue to grow normally.

Unique users is not a good measure of our growth, though.

Much of our traffic is through the Firefox and other browser extensions, which is not measured by these systems.

Additionally, we cut off search indexing several months ago, which also hurts the UU [unique user] numbers.

Since our goal here is not to grow traffic but instead provide a way for people to save things, it’s not something I am really worried about.

That certainly is plausible. Whenever I use del.icio.us I simply save Web pages from the plug-in on my browser, and rarely actually go to the site. I’d estimate that my ratio of saving things to going to the site is 10 to 1, maybe even 20 to 1. As long as people keep saving things to del.icio.us it could prove to be a boon to Yahoo in better search results alone—no matter what the traffic situation is.

But del.icio.us has bigger problems. It has not changed much in years and cannot seem to get its 2.0 version out the door. This despite the fact that Schachter’s team of engineers has been working diligently on improvements since last September. The new version looked like it was ready to go in January, but then the launch was mysteriously pulled. There are rumors that scalability issues were plaguing the project. Hell, it’s been so long that Delicious 2.0 is news again (and, oh yeah, the periods are going away).

While I still do find del.icio.us a useful service, I don’t use it as much as I once did. The Web has evolved and del.cio.us, for whatever reason, has been held back. Here’s to hoping it can push out Delicious 2.0 before Yahoo gets acquired. Because, although Wilson probably won’t be shedding a tear for Yahoo, it is not only small companies that get stifled in acquisitions.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Well, it turns out “friends and family” is fairly expansive term in their book, and includes a lot of people who are quite willing to talk about it. As we said, Publish2 is a Digg-like site where anyone can submit links but only journalists can vote those links up and down. It also has a private research feature that lets journalists bookmark items without sharing them. “It’s like Delicious,” said one person testing the service, adding “I would never use the public part of the service, I’m too competitive to share my research with other journalists.”

So Publish2 looks to be a little like Digg and a little like Delicious. The only problem is that it may not be as good as either of those products.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

It was announced and shown to the public last September along with word that the entire back end had been rewritten as well. And the rebranding of del.icio.us to delicious? Delicious.com has redirected to del.icio.us for at least a year.

The real question is when this will actually launch. We were teased in January on the delicious blog but the promised update never happend. Now it’s March and Yahoo is still silent on the issue.

Don’t think I’m being too hard on SAI. It’s one of my favorite blogs. And we have a history of friendly jabs at each other.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

It shows new sites as they are submitted to Delicious, along with a thumbnail of the homepage and a link. You are supposed to be able to filter the results by keyword and get notifications as well, although it wasn’t immediately apparent to me whether that functionality was working. It’s a nice hack that lets you watch the world bookmark the Web as it is happening. But Ajaxonomy needs to work on the filtering more to make it truly useful.

(Read more on the Ajaxonomy blog).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Well, ok, there was a peep last week. In a blog post titled “using delicious on your iphone” on the Delicious blog, they say “We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious. We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.”

The update may be Delicious 2.0 itself, or simply for information on when we can expect it. The team has obviously been working on a number of other projects as well, like integrating Delicious results directly into Yahoo Search.

My understanding is that the team has finalized most of the functionality and features and is working now to ensure it can handle the load of the full userbase and stay responsive.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I just got word that Yahoo is testing the integration of Delicious user generated bookmarks into Yahoo search results pages (Yahoo acquired Delicious in late 2005). Some users will see the Delicious icon as part of their normal search results, which tells them how many people have bookmarked those pages, as well as the tags people have supplied for those pages.

An example is here, and I’ve included a screenshot.

I have previously written that Delicious search is one of the best ways of searching for things when a standard search doesn’t pull up what you are looking for. After Google, it is my favorite “search engine.” Adding this information into Yahoo search is a great idea.

What isn’t clear is if Delicious results are impacting search rankings, or if Delicious data is simply being integrated into the existing rankings.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 was first added to the list last year. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. They have taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. over the last two years. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Amazon MP3 Store

Amazon’s new music store is just about perfect. With the addition of Warner Music they’ve got 3 million DRM-free songs at prices lower than Apple’s iTunes store (which has only 2 million DRM-free songs). It’s not as cheap as AllOfMP3 was, but at least it’s guilt-free and legal. Plus, it will hopefully drive Apple to improve iTunes (offering no-DRM only search would be a good start).

Amie Street

I have been a huge fan of Amie Street since it launched in mid 2006. They sell songs from unknown artists at variable prices. Every song starts at free, and as more downloads occur the price rises, up to a cap of $.99. Amazon likes the model, too. They invested in Amie Street in August.

Delicious

Delicious was on my list in 2006, but last year I switched to Blue Dot for bookmarking and tagging web pages because it had a semi-private feature that allowed sharing just with friends. This year I’m back with Delicious. They finally got Firefox integration just right, and the new user interface, previewed in September, is a big improvement.

Digg

Digg. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it. But it’s an important source of traffic for us, and a great place to find interesting stories. I added it to the list last year, and it stay’s for another year. Competitor Reddit is another favorite source of news, though, and newcomer Mixx is coming on strong too.

Facebook

Just over a year ago I joined Facebook, and it is now a part of my daily routine to check up on what friends are up to, test a couple of new Facebook applications, and just generally be a part of the community. A year ago they were a hot startup, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how much they were to grow (in size and mindshare) in 2007. They constantly push the boundaries – and no one can say they’re boring. Facebook is the only pure social network I actually use regularly.

Firefox

The Firefox browser is being added to my list for 2008. If it seems like I’m a little late to the party, realize that Firefox on a Mac was essentially unusable until Firefox 3 came out (still in beta). Until recently Flock was my Browser of choice. Now, it’s Firefox.

Flickr

Flickr has been on the list all three years. It’s still the place I put all of my photos online. Someday perhaps Facebook could become the repository for my pictures. But since all my photos are already at Flickr, inertia keeps me there. Hopefully someday the two services will talk to each other more effectively. There should just be one place in the cloud for photos, and all my social networks should access them there.

Gmail

At the end of 2006 I already thought Gmail was close to perfect. This year they added IMAP support, which was the final piece of the puzzle. I still don’t like the way Gmail groups email threads, and tagging could be improved. But it’s an excellent service and just barely edges out Yahoo Mail as my favorite mail application.

Google Reader

Two years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Last year I switched to NetNewsWire. But Google Reader is just too good to ignore any longer. It’s quite simply the most elegant and useful feed reader available today. The product actually first launched in October 2005 but had serious flaws. But it got steadily better over time. Recent privacy hiccups aside, Google Reader is a beautiful web application and an amazing way to digest tons of information effectively.

Netvibes

Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle and My Yahoo are all excellent ways to organize lots of important data sources into a single home page. I’ve been using Netvibes since 2005 and I’ve stuck with it out of inertia more than anything else. Any of these products are perfect for your home page. If you aren’t using one yet, try them out. My Yahoo doesn’t work with Firefox 3 for some reason, though. Hopefully they’ll fix that asap.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list for three years running, and I expect it will stay there for the near future. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have – I’d give up email before I gave up Skype. It would be very nice if they opened up the API and allowed other applications to use the back end Skype service for IM and calls without opening up the Skype client though. MySpace seems to be the first to crack the nut. Hopefully others will follow, or else Gizmo will someday take their spot.

Techmeme

TechMeme is another three-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I probably generate more daily page views at TechMeme than any other website. It’s amazing that this is still a one man (Gabe Rivera), bootstrapped startup.

Technorati

Technorati was on my list in 2006, and off last year because, frankly, it was just too slow to be useful. But over the last year they’ve refocused and made improvements to the core service, and I’ve started using it again for basic blog search. It’s back on my list of top apps.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

I don’t know exactly how to describe Twitter. For people like me it’s a microblogging platform that allows me to push small bits of information – opinions, links, updates – to people who are interested. It’s become a part of my everyday life, and a great way to stay up to date on what friends are up to.

Wordpress

It would be hard to underestimate how much Wordpress makes my life easier. It is the blogging platform that runs all of the TechCrunch network sites, and has been on the list all three years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

YouTube

YouTube was also on the list last year, and it’s grown exponentially since then. I use it for entertainment (nothing good on TV? There’s always something good on YouTube) and work (we post most of our videos there and embed them here on TechCrunch). Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, particularly the spreadsheet application, has become an important productivity tool for us here at TechCrunch. We used it extensively to organize and discuss the hundreds of startups that applied to launch at TechCrunch40 last Fall. Whenever I open Office on my desktop to edit a spreadsheet, I feel the lack of collaborative features keenly. Frankly, Google Docs is just as useful, although Zoho was quicker to launch offline functionality, which gave them the edge on my list. Either product suite is a huge improvement on basic desktop office software.

Almost on the List

Even though I expanded the list this year from fifteen to nineteen companies, there are a bunch of products that could still be added. In the time wasting category there is Duels and KDice. Skreemr is a great music search engine. We also use Docstoc and Scribd all the time to embed documents into posts. I look up traffic stats for startups on Compete daily. And even though I dropped them from the list this year, I still listen to music on Pandora all the time. I have an idea that 23andMe will be on the list next year, after I’ve gotten back the initial DNA results. Finally, Seesmic would almost certainly be on the list, but I left them off because I’m an investor.

And I haven’t even brought up the gadgets that I use every day. The iPhone, the Philips MP3 alarm clock, my Jawbone bluetooth headset. Maybe next year I’ll break out a separate list for gadgets.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Let’s take these rankings one at a time. On the feed reader side, according to this sample of data, Google comes out on top with 37.7 percent of activity, versus 20.7 percent for MyYahoo, and 9.7 percent for Bloglines. Although if you add up the No. 4 (Windows Live) and No. 5 spots (MyMSN), Microsoft as a whole would nudge Bloglines out of the No. 3 position with a combined 13 percent share. Remember, these numbers don’t mean that there are more people who read their RSS feeds via Google Reader than via MyYahoo. It just means that people are adding more feeds to Google Reader (which makes sense, since it is a younger service and people are still filling out their reading lists, whereas with an older service like MyYahoo, people tend to stop adding feeds after a while). You can compare these engagement stats to some old Feedburner data.

On the bookmarking side, in September Google commanded a 17.0 percent share of all Web bookmarking activity, followed by native-browser bookmarking (i.e., “Favorites”) with a 16.1 percent share. Yahoo’s Delicious dropped to third place with a 9.2 percent share, and Facebook came out of nowhere to claim the fourth spot with a 7.1 percent share (beating out Windows Live, Digg, MyWeb, Furl, StumbleUpon, Ask, and Reddit). Again, what this measures is how many times someone actually added a bookmark to one of these services, not how many total subscribers each service has. Bloglines may have more subscribers than Google Bookmarks. All this data shows is that the Google Bookmarks subscribers are more active. Here is a graph of the top-ten bookmarking services over time (notice the dip by Delicious and Facebook’s rise):

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Today they’ve updated the Add-On, and they’ve solved the speed issue. If you are a del.icio.us user, this will become your most-used Firefox Add-ons. If you aren’t one of the 2 million people using Del.icio.us yet, this may be the reason you start. Download the Add-on here.

My biggest complaint about Del.icio.us over the last couple of years has been that it is often too slow. That led me to switch to Bluedot.us, a worthy competitor. But Del.icio.us has made significant speed improvements recently, and this new Add-on is incredibly useful. I’m back at Del.icio.us.

Currently Del.icio.us only allows bookmarks to be public or private. I’m hoping they’ll soon allow users to share bookmarks with friends only, which is sort of in between.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors