Users Taste Yahoo's New Delicious Social Bookmarking

Yahoo has revamped Delicious, improving its social bookmarking property's loading speed, design and search engine.

This incarnation of Delicious will take some serious getting used to, if the discussion forum suggestion comments are any indication.

Gone is the annoying punctuation of the site's original incarnation, Del.icio.us, which the Delicious engineering team said in this blog post had triggered "a zillion different confusions and misspellings" over the years.

I've no doubt this curious spelling dinged traffic. Users with little or no patience weren't likely to keep typing in the correct spelling. Yet the site still has grown to 5 million unique users since Yahoo bought the company two years ago, so who knows.

For traditionalists, the Delicious folks said the del.icio.us domain and all its URLs will continue to work, though the domain change requires a new log-in cookie, so users must log in again.

Once you're in the new site, the changes become readily apparent. Delicious now has three main sections: Bookmarks, People and Tags. The My Tags page is a new way to see all tags in an expanded tag cloud.

With the aid of the new Tag Bar, which has an autocomplete feature to save some typing, users can sift through their bookmarks by using tags and tag combinations.

The new search functionality is greatly improved from the previous iteration because Delicious has followed the lead of several other sites in socializing its search. Now Delicious allows users to not only search their own bookmarks, but also to search a bundle, a tag, their social networks or another person's bookmarks.

You can't underestimate the value of this because it allows users to find content outside the sphere of their own Delicious walled garden.

There are oodles of other features, including a smart action box and selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks.

As usual, users who had grown to love the service are proving hard customers to please. Delicious is getting flamed in its suggestion discussion forum over things people dislike about the new redesign. So far, those who commented on what they disliked about the new Delicious are outnumbering those who said they liked it 55-14.

Killerjay_47 wrote:

Too flashy. I liked del.icio.us because of its simplicity. I just don't like the new interface. Too JavaScripty for my liking. I'm also not a fan of the color scheme and everything being shaded in different colors. I really liked the old interface! It didn't try to glitz everything up; it worked and it wasn't distracting. I guess I'm too old fashioned. It'll probably grow on me in time...

OwenFD wrote:

Where are my unbundled tags? Don't tell me I have to make a bundle called 'Unbundled tags' just to get my unbundled tags. Don't. Like. It. If I can't figure it out by the end of the day, I'll find a different site.

I had the same issue as OwenFD. In fact, eWEEK's editorial staff has a Delicious group account where we all go to tag our stories. For my most recent story on Google buying Omnisio, I had to click around for the usual tags we use, but was able to find them. I quickly figured out how Delicious was grouping everything, so I'm not going to huff and puff about it.

So far, so good. Delicious welcomes feedback here. OpenID support, a Safari plug-in and the ability to edit multiple bookmarks at once are some of the current suggestions.