Taste The New Delicious

It’s been four months since we checked in on the new owners of Delicious. After playing around with the site since some big updates rolled out late last week, let’s see how the new service is doing.

First of all, the whole site has been redesigned from the ground up, as you can see from the Delicious front page. It has a much more evident multimedia approach, which you would expect in a service built in 2011/2012. Also, bookmarks have been replaced by links. That sounds like a small change, but it’s probably one of the most important. Bookmarks are for private, personal use. Links have a social element, and you share them with friends. Stacks, user-created groups of links, have also been added and are heavily emphasized on the home page. Changing users’ vocabulary is an important step in changing the service’s culture and convincing people that they need this site.

The recent decommissioning of Delicious plugins and browser extensions has raised a lot of eyebrows. Delicious’s team says that the plugins and extensions haven’t been actively hobbled, but they’re not being updated to keep up with site changes. In their place, Delicious has introduced a cross-browser bookmarklet, which works on standard browsers and mobile devices. After you find a link you want to save, hit the bookmarklet and you get a popup that looks something like this:

Using the new Delicious Bookmarklet

As you can see, Delicious has included a lot of controls in the popup. The one problem I had with this screen is that the stack name isn’t persistent; it doesn’t stay selected between links, which becomes frustrating when you’re building a stack quickly. Tags are optional but still available, and Delicious automatically suggests a few that other users have used for that link. The site also remembers your tags and pre-fills them after you start typing, much like modern search engines do.

The real gosh-wow (if you’re easily gosh-wowed as I am) of the bookmarklet is the link description. This is a place to add your own commentary or, as many on Facebook do, provide an excerpt from the link. With Delicious, you can type your description in the text field or if you highlight text on the page, that text is pre-filled when you hit the bookmarklet. Delicious pre-fills as much text as you want, but you can only save 1,000 characters in the description.

Okay, let’s say you’ve saved a bunch of links into a stack. What’s next?

Personal Delicious links page

Above is my profile page. The Links section is highlighted in blue, and the links I’ve saved are listed in last-to-first order. Here I can filter by tag or use the tick boxes on the left to perform other actions. Using the arrow icon on the right, I can email links or send them to other Delicious users, and I can use the pencil icon to edit the link. Other users can also access my link page and filter by tag, as well as adding my links to their own stack.

If you click the Stacks link at the top of the page, you’re taken to a list of my stacks. Here I can select and edit them as seen in the screencap below. Delicious has provided an intuitive stack editing process, including drag-and-drop capabilities to reorder links. Other users view and share my stacks with provided Facebook and Twitter buttons. They can also comment on a link, suggest an addition, or choose to follow me or one of my stacks and be updated when I make changes.

Editing Delicious Stacks

(Here’s the stack I’ve been working on in this post so you can see the final product.)

I’m pretty pleased with the new Delicious, though there are some improvements I’d love to see. For example, there should be a thumbnail-only option on the stack editing screen, making it easier to visualize the stack’s flow and drag links into order without scrolling. Also, the hybrid view of stacks needs some attention. It orders links from left to right then down, mimicking Facebook’s new Timeline view, which seems right until you realize every link is a different length. Often, it isn’t clear which order they’re supposed to go in, and that entirely defeats the purpose of letting users decide the order.

Delicious has given headlines the way-too-short limit of sixty characters. I understand including a limit, but it should be at least double that, if not more. Same goes for sharing stacks to Facebook. The title of the stack I’ve been screencapping isn’t that long, but it gets truncated at sixty characters, shorter than Facebook’s limit.

Most of all, I don’t know why I would use Delicious. It’s a nice, well-designed service, and it cleans up my Facebook wall pretty well, but the only other use I can come up with is enabling pre-teen girls’ obsessions with whoever is the heartthrob of the moment. Otherwise, I’m truly at a loss for its usefulness.

Have you used the new Delicious? Let us know in the comments what you think and what you use it for.