New Delicious

46 links saved by Samantha Lambright in 2013 on Delicious.
Joined Delicious in 2007, 5% of links were saved in 2013.

AVOS’ first original project, following its previous acquisition of Delicious from Yahoo, it’s similarly based around the idea of content curation, but whereas Delicious is about tags and bookmarks, Zeen is a more developed version of the ‘social newspaper’ services like Paper.li that were popular a couple of years ago, allowing more customization of the content.

Tools along the top of the magazine allow you to add content from the likes of Google searches, YouTube content, Instagram photos, Twitter, RSS feeds (you have to enter the feed URL) – or content you’ve clipped from around the Web using a blookmarklet.

That means that almost everything the company added in January, with the exception of the redesigned front page, is going away. And the front page will have to be completely reworked to accommodate the sudden absence of stacks. This is full-on retreat, and after only seven months. My guess is that the company found it too much of an uphill climb to get people past the tainted Delicious brand or its virtual dinosaur status. I would also imagine that the dwindling and notoriously curmudgeonly Delicious community’s staunch opposition to the restructuring had something to do with it.

Delicious has had a hard time finding its place in the social web, not unlike the office word processor guru in the 1990s who could never figure out Microsoft Excel 2003 and is completely lost at the prospect of Excel 2012. An updated purpose was in order when AVOS, the company that bought Delicious from Yahoo in 2011 after years of corporate neglect, took over, but it remains unclear what they want to be. Pinterest (Tagline: “Organize and share things you love”) has been the most obvious comparison these past seven months, but now AVOS seems poised to change course again, this time aiming for a service that easily compares to Flipboard (Tagline: “Your Social Magazine”). AVOS is scheduled to debut a new product called Zeen (Tagline: “DISCOVER & CREATE Beautiful Magazines”) by the end of the month. The now-scrapped Delicious features could easily be slipped into that context, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see some — if not all– of the now-scrapped Delicious features show up there.

What does this mean for Delicious? We don’t know for sure, but it can’t be good. Unless AVOS gives the service a new and convincing purpose soon, I fear the days of Delicious are numbered.

New stacks can no longer be created on Delicious. Starting in early August of 2012, stack creation will be disabled across the site.

All existing stacks will be automatically converted into tags. Stack titles will transition into tag names, and will be attached as new tags to all links currently in a stack. These tags can be edited, renamed, or deleted at any time.

We introduced stacks last year as a visually rich way to think about your links and we’ve been blown away by the amazing content you’ve created. But given the upcoming launch of new products from Delicious’ parent company, AVOS, and our focus on simplifying the Delicious site, we realized the value of stacks is limited for our users moving forward.

For this reason, we’ve decided to simplify how users organize links on Delicious by consolidating stacks into tags. Users will no longer be able to create stacks on Delicious starting in early August, 2012.

Stacks are a great way to organize and present the content you’re passionate about and add your voice on why it matters. Now we’re letting others join the fun – stacks just got social.

With the latest Delicious update, you can now:

- Collaborate on stacks
- Comment on stacks and suggest new links for stacks.
- Build stack responses
- Create private stacks for yourself or a group

Since there's so much content on the web (and so little time!), we're really past the Age of Information and fully into the Age of Discovery. Not discovery in terms of being the first to unearth a new idea, concept or artifact, but rather the realization of common knowledge, interests and expertise to bring us closer together.

This is the powerful notion that's being Spotify, the music-sharing service that's so popular thanks to Facebook's recent changes. On Delicious, the ability to search by category and interest (rather than being bombarded by random sharing of music that may or may not interest you) means that you're more likely to find what you're looking for or at least that you'll be able to narrow a search without too much trouble.

The changes are likely to seem a little jarring to long-time users of the service, but for tablet owners, this kind of visual presentation of information that makes sense. Since users can toggle back and forth between views, it's even more appealing; in these times, we never know what our users are going to prefer, and we can't simply rely on the one size fits all approach any more.

Checking out the new http://delicious.com/ it's sort of a visual wikipedia, with some elements of what Mahalo was aiming for.

The categories are certainly geared towards the developer and designer professional (at least the default view)

The surfacing of screenshots makes it easier to browser rather than the legacy Delicious product which was blue and purple text over and over.

Content is ordered in "Stacks" (a visual set of bookmarks of a related topic)

The changes to the site come just over six months after YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen acquired it from Yahoo in April. The sale price was undisclosed, but speculation during the lead up to the deal suggested Delicious was available for $5 million. If correct, this figure represents a hefty loss on Yahoo’s rumoured $18 million purchase price when it bought Delicious from from founder Joshua Schachter in 2005.

We’re not standing still, we continue to actively listen to and consider user feedback. This latest release also includes many small visual and consistency tweaks in response to feedback, a fix to the Firefox Bookmarklet to get better consistency of tags and lots of other small improvements.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working on building ways of enabling you to work together on stacks, streamline the stack experience, integrating more of the functionality from Trunk.ly and continuing to improve and refine the overall experience on delicious.com. We’re also aware of an issue where YouTube Video pages can’t be saved in Chrome using the bookmarklet at the moment and we’re looking into it.

We’ve begun a comprehensive overhaul of how the Delicious UI deals with information density and hierarchy, while applying a clean, consistent style. Giving Delicious an interface flexible enough to add new features moving forward was a strong consideration. It required us to take into account overarching themes like how content types get presented (stacks, links, actions, and so on) to minute details like a consistent button style.

A collection of the press and blogger reactions to the Trunk.ly acquistion by AVOS (Delicious).

As a result, Trunk.ly will be discontinued, and we will immediately start working to integrate our technology and insights to accelerate the link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious.

Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS, says that once they began discussing the possibility of acquisition with Trunk.ly, it became clear that their “visions for the future of bookmarking and discovery were closely aligned,” adding, “Their technology and insights will accelerate link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious.”

Trunk.ly itself was founded in December 2010 by Tim Bull and Alex Dong, and offered its users the ability to save all the links they “liked” or favorited on social services such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, all organized into one place.

Funny, it seems like only yesterday that Trunk.ly co-founder Bull was commenting on TechCrunch, how the “new Delicious looks great, but we think automation (collecting links for you across your social graph) and search (forget tagging, just build a personal “google” of the sites you like) are where it’s at.”

Looks like AVOS must have agreed.

What was once awesome and useful is now filled with dogs in costumes and photos of donuts. Trailblazing social bookmarking service Delicious relaunched this morning under new management.

Unfortunately, a lot of the best parts of the old site have been lost. The most Popular links for a tag are broken and there are no longer RSS feeds being made readily available.

I don't like it. I want to like it, but I don't so far.

Although I’ve felt for some months now that Storify is on the verge of having a breakthrough in how people approach content on the web, Delicious now has something that they don’t, scale (all the users inherited from Yahoo). Only time will tell whether anyone still cares enough about Delicious to go back for this new experience. I, for one, have moved on to Pinboard.in but Delicious smartly retains its simple bookmarking features for those of us who just want to do that, while offering curation features for its new audience.

It’s also worth noting that I’m in the same DreamIt Ventures class as another awesome curation/bookmarking app called Spling. Let the curation wars begin!

Rather than talking about the new feature called the stack, I guess it’s the old bundle version that nobody used, I’ll talk about stuff that no longer work.
...

Finally, Delicious was stripped of all the features that the geeks I used. For the normal bookmark guy I guess it’s ok, but not for me. As a matter of fact, when reading other blogs, It seems that I am the only one complaining about the new version.

"At the very least, provide the option like Twitter and Facebook did to have the user stay on the "old" platform so they could get used to the new one, or choose never to move to the new one at all."
- by Moya Hilliam

"I have the same problem. I can't acces to my account and reset password didnt work, My account is oier_a and I have 5271 links there that I have bookmarked for the last seven years. Some one from the staff should answer something here, I think that we, the users, are the first value of this kind of site, and if they dont care about us the bussiness is dead."
- by Oier Araolaza

I was excited that Delicious was going to be "saved"... now, not so much. It should have been allowed to die. I used it multiple times a day, now I can't get the bookmarklet to work, the stacks are useless.... sometimes, "don't fix it if it ain't broke" is a good motto.

Wow. It looks at first glance like a competitor to Pinterest now.

I'm just happy to see it getting some attention after years of being ignored by its old owner, Yahoo.

That said, I hope it will be as useful as it was before. I really liked the utilitarian nature of the old site.

On the new Delicious website, you’ll find little references to ‘bookmarking’ as such. Rather, the revamped service aims to sway users into saving and sharing ‘stacks’ of online content with others. A stack is a collection of links built around a common theme or topic that can be shared in full with other users, enabling easy and swift discovery of online content by cutting through the noise.

AVOS calls said stacks ‘playlists for the Web’, which I think is an apt metaphor.

Also new: multi-word tags (e.g. “TechCrunch rocks”) and media previews. And wave goodbye to ‘network’, ‘fans’ and ‘subscriptions’, because the new Delicious is adopting the ‘Following’ concept we’ve learned to love thanks to Twitter, Facebook and other popular services.

A stack is a collection of links built around a common theme. To get started, visit the stack tab on your profile page and click “create stack.” Choose at least three links, add juicy descriptions, pick the best images, choose the layout, and shuffle the order of links. When you’re all set, click publish to share your Delicious stack.

Delicious, the social bookmarking service, hopes its new feature, Stacks, will make the company cool again. The site’s new front page is designed for easier browsing, featuring a collection of large thumbnails, giving the previously text-link heavy page a more appealing look. The redesign moves Delicious into the territory of services such as Squidoo, which allows you to easily create a hub of information on a specific topic.

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