Delicious Changes, Better? Or Deviating From Its Core Value
So Delicious has had some pretty drastic changes. I’m a heavy user of Delicious so I thought I would comment on it.
I hope someone from Delicious reads this because I have a few suggestions.
You can read about the changes in the Delicious blog post, but here’s a quick rundown:
- Twitter integration
- Time filter
- Trends graph
- Tag filter
- Enhanced search results
- Search suggestions
- URL shortener? (maybe, seen in tweet by @delicious)
Search
Great job. The UI for search is great. I can easily select multiple tags (include tag in search or even exclude it from search, three states total) for the search. The recommendations are helpful to find more specifics like phrases the word was used in. Trends are nifty to see the change in popularity of a word in links that people have saved.
Twitter integration
Wow. This reminds me a lot of Breaking Tweets where some item is given and relevant tweets about it are shown. This is awesome to see what this link means to others. I really like this part of the Twitter integration.
Bookmark Sending/Sharing
Delicoius has always had the ability to send bookmarks through Delicious by putting a tag ‘for:username’. Now in addition, you can send through email or broadcast on your Twitter. This is nifty, but I think it’s more fluff. There needs to be more work on sharing inside Delicious, because by sharing out via the other methods the reciprocation isn’t really trackable.
Delicious founder Joshua Schachter commented on a tweet that he hates the twitter integration.
Some say Delicious is not about sharing but about “…information collection and quick reference.” I say Delicious is a social bookmarking site. It’s all about sharing, but Delicious’ archiving and referencing usage has been strong that this stands out the most.
How I’ve been using Delicious
I’ve been a fan since who knows when, well at least before Yahoo! bought Delicious and when the URL was still Del.icio.us) and found easy ways to find relevant bookmarks besides the search form.
There’s lots you can do besides the typical delicious.com page and delicious.com/popular pages.
Simple URL Manipulation
Finding popular bookmarks with a tag is easy:
You can easily search and filter by tags by using this URL and putting tags together using the ‘+’ sign. This gives you recent bookmarks with those tags (or use one tag):
I’m sure there’s more out there like filter by dates and such (but would probably be through the API).
What I Would Like
Have a permalink to a single bookmark on delicious (similar to how on Twitter you can click the date to view one tweet). This is so I can share bookmarks on delicious so others can read my comments or save the bookmark right there.
Better view for network bookmarks. I actually use the Delicious network page as my homepage so I would like to be able to navigate my network’s bookmarks more easily and distinguish between users (besides just text). Maybe have a profile picture, except be unique and have users use a favicon, that would be sweet and relevant!
Commenting via Twitter integration. Show tweets about links, but only from people in my Delicious or Twitter networks! This could be the “commenting” feature that people have been asking for. Well, it wouldn’t be commenting with threading per say, but it would definitely be a conversation starter.
Outbox. The inbox parrallel to emails is great, work with it. Maybe have an outbox too? An outbox to view the links I’ve shared with my network and with whom I’ve shared them with.
Conclusion
I don’t think that Delicious is really deviating, I’d say the changes are exploring different ways to search. I just wish they would concentrate on sharing between users on delicious and making things more social within delicious.
