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Delicious Bookmarking Relaunches Sans Yahoo

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:01:59 +0000

The new, more eye-catching Delicious.com

The newly revamped Delicious bookmarking service has relaunched. While the new Delicious is missing a few features, and has been demoted back to beta status, long time users will be happy to see that someone is finally giving the original king of online bookmarking a little love.

After Yahoo acquired Delicious back in 2005 the site languished. Updates were infrequent and fans watched as the web effectively passed Delicious by. Unable to decided what to do with Delicious, Yahoo eventually settled on sending it off to the “sunset.” Later Yahoo changed its mind and sold the site to AVOS, a new company from YouTube creators Chad Hurley and Steven Chen.

The new Delicious website is the first step in AVOS’s plan to return Delicious to its former glory and also make it appeal to a wider audience. For now that means that Delicious.com has seen a minor redesign with rounded corners and more images. The site looks a little less spartan, but most of the big changes are behind the scenes.

In a blog post on the AVOS website the Delicious team writes that the primary goal with the relaunch was to update the backed code:

the eight-year-old site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The result is a new homepage, interface and back-end architecture designed to make Delicious easier to use.

We’re proud of what we built, but the process has also brought the site “back to beta” as a work in progress.

For long time Delicious users the relaunch may be a little disappointing. There aren’t any new features to speak of, rather the terminology of Delicious has been updated to fit with the times. For example one of the main new features in the revamped Delicious is the “Stacks” feature, which allows you to create collections of links and share them with other users. That probably sounds familiar to existing Delicious users since it’s really just a rebranding of the old Delicious Bundles.

Similarly instead of adding users to your network you now “follow” them and there are no more Bookmarks, rather you’re saving links. And Delicious users can now add avatars to their profile.

While there’s nothing wrong with updating Delicious to use the parlance of the times, long time users have expressed some disappointment that the new version has broken some features of the old. For it’s part AVOS seems well aware of the problem, hence the “back to beta” message in the AVOS blog post, but of course that does little to appease users missing their pet features. Some the features you may miss include tag clouds, batch tag operations and of course Bundles, though Stacks are pretty close. On the plus side AVOS has retained the proper privacy settings for your bookmarks (er, links), the API and feeds still work and it’s now possible to use multi-word tags, something that wasn’t possible on the old Delicious.

In fact, while the new Delicious may be a slight regression in functionality, long time users should be relieved to know that, after years of being ignored by Yahoo, someone is finally willing to put some work into Delicious.

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Last Call for Delicious Bookmarks

Scott Gilbertson — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:49:27 +0000

Attention Delicious bookmarking fans, time is running out to transition your bookmarks to the updated, launching-soon Delicious website.

Current Delicious users have until September 23, 2011 to transfer their data and accept the new terms of service. If you don’t move your data by then your bookmarks will disappear forever.

After years of languishing at Yahoo, Delicious, the original king of online bookmarking, was purchased by AVOS, a new company from YouTube creators Chad Hurley and Steven Chen.

The transfer of ownership means that existing users need to agree to the new terms of service before Delicious can relaunch. You can read over the new terms on the AVOS website. If you prefer not to be part of the new Delicious, but would still like to grab your bookmarks before they go poof, you can do so using Delicious’ export tools.

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Yahoo Looking to Sell, Not Shut Down Delicious

Scott Gilbertson — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:19:05 +0000

Good news Delicious fans — Yahoo has finally made something of an announcement, saying that the bookmarking service will not be shut down, but sold off.

Despite a leaked, internal image that listed Delicious and other services in a “sunset” category, Yahoo denies it is planning to shut the bookmarking service down.

The Delicious blog says the service is looking for “a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users.”

According to the same announcement, the tech press is to blame for assuming that “sunset” meant shut down. More likely, Yahoo simply wasn’t ready for the level of backlash that rumors of Delicious’ demise brought about, and now the company is backpedalling.

Yahoo also hasn’t made any announcement regarding MyBlogLog, Yahoo Buzz or any of the other services listed as “sunset” in the leaked graphic that circulated last week.

Presumably, in some cases, sunset does in fact mean “shut down.”

Still, the word that Delicious will live on in some form is good news for the millions of users and bookmarks the service currently hosts. Unfortunately, Yahoo has not denied that it has laid off the engineers and technical staff behind Delicious.

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Better Bookmarking: Clipmarks

Adam Duvander — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:56:33 +0000

Clipmarks is a simple bookmarking Firefox extension that is tied to a much larger collection of user’s shared bits of saved pages. Like Snipd, which I looked at yesterday, Clipmarks lets you save not just URLs, but pieces of the page.

The process of clipping information feels a little slower than other services. To add a comment or tags, you need to wait for a pop-up window to load. I expect a Firefox extension to use a non-web interface. All the functionality of Clipmarks seems possible via a bookmarklet, which could then be used in other browsers.

The real fun of Clipmarks comes from consuming others’ clips. You can follow users, similar to Twitter. Then those you follow are called “guides” and you can see a stream of the latest content shared by them.

Browsing clips, with its chrome-y interface, also feels a little slow. Luckily, Clipmarks has a wealth of RSS feeds. Following individual people or all your guides through an external reader is easy.

Connecting to other services is another area where Clipmarks really shines. Give it your Delicious or Magnolia credentials and your clips will also be posted to that service. For someone with many links stored on Delicious, it’s nice to know I don’t have to give up my old standby just to enjoy what’s new in bookmarking.

Similarly, you can clip pages directly into a blog post, email to friends, and share your clips in a Flash widget. Despite complaints I’ve had with speed, Clipmarks does get the social part of social bookmarking.

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Better Bookmarking: Snipd

Adam Duvander — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:20:21 +0000

Y Combinator summer startup Snipd is working on a bookmarking-like service that saves pieces of a website, such as text and photos. The service is in closed alpha, but Webmonkey got a chance to check it out.

To simply save a page with the Snipd bookmarklet is fast. Just click and everything happens behind the scenes. Tagging or describing the page you’re saving takes a bit more time, but also happens directly on the page without having to visit Snipd’s site.

The real power of Snipd is the ability to “snip” pieces of content from a page. You can grab text, images, even video. The Snipd content can be shared by email, or directly on your stream, in a Tumblr-esque view.

When multiple items are saved from a single page, they are shown together. Looking back at my stream, one might guess that it takes more than just a few clicks to curate the content.

The link+commentary style of Delicious feels a little stale compared to lively Snipd. There is more to a web page than its URL, and Snipd lets you zero in on the pieces that are important, then share them.

With only seed funding from Y Combinator, a summer, and a team of five (two of which are back at school), Snipd has made significant progress. The team spent this week in the Techcrunch 50 DemoPit and was leading the vote after the first day.

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Delicious Gets New Look, Loses Dots

Adam Duvander — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:44:23 +0000

Social-bookmarking pioneer Delicious released its long-awaited redesign today. While our favorite features, and several new ones, are present, one thing is obviously missing: its dots!

The delicious.com domain name has long redirected to del.icio.us, but the reverse is now true. The low-down on the name change, from the Delicious blog:

We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com” and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.

The new site has softer blues, more shading and a more intuitive user interface. For example, the popular page used to have its input in the header, with a directory path metaphor.

That worked for the techies amongst us, but Delicious needed to work for everybody. The new interface, while just a tweak, is much more usable (though I’m still disappointed I can’t search popular for multiple tags).

Of course, the new look goes further than what I’ve mentioned. Delicious has a video that describes the changes, and a full accounting on their what’s new page.

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