Yahoo Delicious begins letting users tweet their bookmarks on Twitter, bringing the social bookmarking service a real-time relevancy it lacked. This comes as real-time search engine features are becomingly increasingly table stakes. Microsoft Bing is already there. Will Google and Yahoo follow?Yahoo has integrated its Delicious
bookmarking service with Twitter and added better search tools to help users
find the freshest bookmarks.
The Fresh Bookmarks tab on the Delicious home page shows users the most
recently saved Delicious bookmarks that are popping on Twitter. Think of this
as a hot trends feature in Twitter, Google Bing or Yahoo, but for the Delicious
bookmarking tool instead.
"This algorithm combines the latest actions on Delicious and popular
discussions on Twitter to bring you the best and freshest links about
technology, web, politics, and media," Yahoo Director of Product Management Ariel Seidman wrote in a blog post Aug. 4.
When users save a bookmark from Delicious using the Firefox extension or
bookmarklets, they can e-mail or tweet their bookmarks right from Delicious
instead of copying and pasting URLs into e-mails or Twitter updates. These
options are visible when users add recipients in the Send field.
The new Delicious search tools include advanced timeline and tag filtering
controls so that users can search within a given date range or filter the
results by tag to help find the freshest bookmarks. This is particularly useful
for Delicious users who have been using the service for several years and have
thousands of bookmarks stored.
The search results page has also been enhanced to display YouTube videos
with inline playback, Flickr images and Yelp local data. Users can see pictures
of the new tools at the Google Watch blog here.
The advanced search tools are a nice improvement, but the Delicious team
really needed to surface Twitter tweets to keep up with all of the real-time
search innovation happening at companies like OneRiot, Collecta, TweetMeme and Topsy.
Microsoft's Bing search engine is already indexing Twitter tweets. Facebook
is also beginning to surface real-time information, and Google will likely
follow.
Delicious built a bridge to Twitter to stay relevant at a time when several
Yahoo acquisitions are falling into the growing deadpool of castoffs.
Delicious' parent is also going to get into the real-time search
sweepstakes.
Yahoo search executives have also pledged to look hard at real-time indexing in the wake of the 10-year search
ad blockbuster deal Microsoft and Yahoo struck July 29.