
A New Flavor... Still Delicious - sahillavingia
http://www.avos.com/new-delicious/
======
jasonkester
Hmm...

So I log in and the first obvious difference is that I can see exactly four
bookmarks on the screen at once. And if I scroll I see that there are only 10
per page. Don't you think that's a bit sparse?

I'm not sure what use case the new owners think most people are on the site
for, but for me it's to save bookmarks and quickly find them again. I used to
have a nice tall list that I could scan down quickly.

So I click a tag off the sidebar to narrow things down a bit. Nine
Mississippi. Ten Mississippi, and I came back here to update my comment. I can
see the other tab still spinning.

Searching came back fast enough, but really, I don't want to have to type
keywords in to find links that a few days ago were in a nice tight list on a
single screen.

In all, this seems like a huge step backward.

Beyond that, the homepage seems to have changed. I've never used the homepage,
so I can't comment on whether that's an improvement or not. Anybody know what
the homepage is supposed to be for? Looking at _other people's_ bookmarks?

~~~
joelanman
Looking at other people's bookmarks is one of the main ways I use Delicious:
either by searching (I find it much better than google for certain things, eg.
finding popular software) or using the Popular page to see what's new
(normally pretty weighted towards web-dev on Delicious, but you can browse
tags for other topics).

------
britta
My old Delicious "network" aggregated bookmarks from 100 people I was
following; it looks like only 20 of them transferred their bookmarks to new
Delicious. (By comparison, 40 of them are in my Pinboard network.) I probably
learned more from reading my Delicious network over the past eight years than
I learned in college (and I _liked_ college); my network was a wonderful
little personal community of people trading interesting, thoughtful, timely,
links from around the web over many years. (Twitter now serves this purpose
for a ton of people, which is lovely, but a carefully-chosen Delicious network
had a signal-to-noise ratio that was pretty unbeatable.) So I'm sad that I
seem to no longer be able to follow my network's links in aggregate to see
what they've saved recently. But Delicious has been breaking the hearts of
former employees for years, and eventually you stop caring so much. Yay for
Pinboard!

~~~
wyclif
I feel the same way. User since 2003, migrated to Pinboard. This misses the
curation from back in the day. I probably share some of those users in my old
network.

In any case, Pinboard is the true heir to del.icio.us.

~~~
initself
It costs money.

~~~
britta
Yes, it does. If you're interested in long-term web-based storage of personal
bookmarks, Pinboard's fee is a type of improvement over Delicious, since it
helps the service stay calmly stable over time.

------
CrLf
Whenever there's change, there's always some degree of resistance. That being
said...

Why the obsession with sparse layouts? Too much information can be negative,
yes, but the old layout was compact yet not overwhelming.

Where's the tag cloud? This may be the single most annoying thing with the new
layout... Not only the tag cloud was a more compact way to display all the
tags, but it also emphasized the more frequently used ones.

Where's the tag filtering? Previously I could click on a tag, and then add
other tags to display only the bookmarks that matched all of them.

What's up with the picture on links whenever they have a comment?

And finally...

When you have something that works, why in $DEITY's name will you go out on a
rampage and rewrite it from scratch? You know, if people used the site, maybe
it had something going for it...

I never considered switching away from delicious before. But now that it is a
different beast altogether, with most of what made it useful for me before (I
couldn't care less about "social" features), I just might.

~~~
apgwoz
You still can filter by multiple tags. Just keep clicking on tags in the
sidebar.

I rather like the promise. Since this is basically a complete rewrite, I'm
sure they'll take into consideration the feedback from their users. And I'm
sure there will be a lot of it.

~~~
CrLf
Frankly, I dislike "promise". You do not remove features from users without a
significant reason, you work within the constrains of what you have and build
upon that.

The tag list isn't even ordered alphabetically anymore, for $DEITY's sake...

How would users react in they opened Word one day and found out it was
actually Notepad, just because Microsoft wanted to create a "beautiful thing"
and rewrite Word from scratch...?

~~~
jamesbritt
_The tag list isn't even ordered alphabetically anymore, for $DEITY's sake..._

I just checked my account, expanded All Tags, and they're listed
alphabetically. I also saw there were options to show up to 100 bookmarks per
page, and reduce the amount of detail shown.

Looks very much like old Delicious. If I could make the font size of the
bookmark titles the same size as pretty much all other text on the page (and
therefore get more items visible at a time) I'd be more than happy. And I can
fix that with Greasemonkey.

------
jamesgeck0
It's a complete rewrite, but I'm still surprised they missed so many basic
features. It's rather frustrating to use.

* No iPhone version of the site anymore.

* Links are bookmarked as soon as you click the bookmarklet, not when you click save on in the popup window.

* No suggest-as-you-type tags when using the bookmarket.

* Both <http://delicious.com> and <http://www.delicious.com> exist, and you can be signed in on one but not the other. There are also links on one that redirect to the other.

* If you are logged out, clicking on the bookmarklet pulls up the site's registration screen in a new window. This window does not have horizontal scrollbars and is not wide enough to see the login link.

* For some reason there's no hand cursor on mouse-over of links.

~~~
getsat
> * Both <http://delicious.com> and <http://www.delicious.com> exist, and you
> can be signed in on one but not the other. There are also links on one that
> redirect to the other.

In addition to being dumb in general, this is also a huge SEO faux pas...
though, it would appear they couldn't care less:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=site:delicious.com>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.delicious.com>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=site:del.icio.us>

That's a lot of organic search traffic left on the table.

------
rb2k_
> We’re still supporting all Delicious APIs and feeds

I would beg to differ:

$ curl <http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/recent?count=20>

curl: (6) Could not resolve host: feeds.delicious.com; nodename nor servname
provided, or not known

------
john2x
Dammit. I wanted to save a page. I click my Chrome plugin, it no longer works.
I go to Delicious.com, drag the new bookmarklet into my bookmarks bar, and
attempt to save again.

It has a dropdown to be added into a stack, but no indication that it
_doesn't_ need to be in a stack (made me hesitate a bit, why do I need stacks
_and_ tags?).

The worse part is when typing in tags, it no longer autocompletes for the tags
I already use. Now I'm at risk at using different tags for similar content
(e.g. tutorial/tutorials, book/books)

~~~
johnx123-up
Same here. It cleared auto-login and forgot password doesn't work.

~~~
seclorum
Ditto. I have come to love my little "TAG" button that comes with the Chrome
delicious plugin, but it doesn't work any more .. this is definitely a feature
regression. I wouldn't have so much use out of Delicious if it weren't so easy
to tag a site - the current multi-click futzing around is very frustrating,
and of course it really doesn't help that the image/URL code for the "Save a
Link" button is broken, so you can't actually drag the button to your bookmark
toolbar, as they suggest.

Not cool, new Delicious owners. We dedicated users are getting a bit ticked
off here .. I'll give it a week before I switch to Pinboard or some other
local, smart, solution for managing my bookmark collections.

------
alaithea
The new front page design smacks of those spammy "10 AMAZING Photos of [fill
in the blank]" sites which steal other people's content and don't properly
attribute it. I can't bring myself to click on any of the stacks; I just want
to avert my eyes.

------
metabrew
No pagination (yet, i hope), means i can't browse more than one page of links
for any tag, which is rather useless for now.

I want to try the stacks feature. I'm not sure if I care about it or not, but
until i can browse all my old links, I have nothing to make stacks with.

Hope they bring back the tag cloud page.

Clicking my tags in the list to the right adds them to the current selection,
/tag1+tag2+tag3, with no indication apart from the URL of what's selected and
now to deselect. That mechanic is broken horribly right now, but exposing tag
intersections is a good idea in general.

The best thing about delicious was the network feed.. that's why I went to the
site most days. I hope that is coming back ASAP.

Based on the design and avatar placement, I'm assuming the ability to comment
on links others have saved is coming soon: good.

Chrome extension no longer works (why?! it just tagged stuff...) I don't have
a bookmark bar visible, so bookmarklets make me sad.

Bit of a rough relaunch, but I guess they always are..

------
mhd
Like many others here, I switched to pinboard a while ago. And strangely
enough, even though that is run by a single person, I trust it more to respond
to users wishes and generally be updated. Don't care about the social aspects,
so the user base really doesn't matter to me. I want my bookmarks managed, if
somebody else has to share something, blogs and twitter are sufficient, I
don't need to bookmark-stalk someone…

And is it just me or did their default bookmarklet add those silly stacks, but
drop tag autocompletion?

~~~
johnx123-up
If you don't care about social aspects, why can you just live with browser
sync? (really asking)

~~~
zbuc
The tagging is really nice for organizing things, and having the date you
bookmarked it associated is nice as well. I know I'll sometimes think, "What
was that site I looked at last year that had that cool ____?" and it's pretty
easy to find if you can just scroll through by date bookmarked.

~~~
johnx123-up
To filter by date, Google's web history is better than delicious with heatmap
stuffs, IMHO (YMMV)

------
lbolla
Is it just me or delicious.com is now terribly slow?

Overall, I'm not impressed.

* the "Hi, <my-name>" dropdown menu must be the most horrible I've ever seen;

* why do I need to have a picture?! I just want to save/share bookmarks!

* all this "stack feature": I barely see the point. grouping can be done with tags (well done with allowing tags with spaces!).

------
logic
Am I blind, or has the API documentation completely disappeared?

I've also noticed that some of the RSS feeds I had previously subscribed to
are starting to 404. I haven't had the patience to track down what the new
URLs are, but no redirects? Really?

Email addresses with plus signs in the left-hand side now appear to be a new
pain point. :P (My existing plussed-address is still in place, but any changes
I make to my settings cause a server-side insistance that the email I've
entered is invalid.)

So far, not impressed with the first steps Avos have taken, and I say this as
a long-time fan of Delicious.

~~~
zakj
Yep, the API documentation is gone; <http://delicious.com/help/tools> claims
that developer documentation is coming soon. In the meantime, Pinboard's API
almost exactly matches Delicious's, and its documentation is still up:
<http://pinboard.in/api>.

Incidentally, the Delicious API is still working correctly (albeit slowly) for
me.

------
wongsifu
I can't have a tag of two letters. I have a lot 500 errors when I browse my
links.

Ouch !

------
mcobrien
The TextMate of bookmarking apps... I've happily moved to Pinboard thanks.

~~~
brndnhy
Does Pinboard show you how many others bookmarked the same link, including the
usernames?

It's nice when a bookmarking service can be a discovery tool itself.

~~~
motdiem
yes it shows you "x others" next to your link, when you click on it you can
see the list of other users who bookmarked it

------
Skillset
Like many of the commenters, I'm not crazy about the changes. But I do notice
one marked improvement, though I'm not sure how many others will share my
experience.

I've been using this Delicious bookmarklet for Chrome
([http://www.techlifeweb.com/2008/09/11/delicious-
bookmarklet-...](http://www.techlifeweb.com/2008/09/11/delicious-bookmarklet-
for-google-chrome)) and noticed that about a year ago, it was displaying only
the five suggested tags, instead of all the recommended tags for that site. To
make things worse, they didn't even seem to be the most relevant five — nearly
every site was tagged "inspiration" or "design," undoubtedly by web designers
looking for ideas.

Now that it's relaunched, the suggested tags are back to normal! I know I
should just enter my own tags, but it kind of defeats the purpose of tapping
the wisdom of crowds.

Now it's time to go back and re-tag a year's worth of bookmarks...er, links. A
delicious prospect indeed.

------
mixman
What happened to the network view of those you follow? It was one of my main
means of finding interesting content.

------
mikemoka
they may have just killed delicious.. why didn't they do a private beta
before?...

~~~
johnx123-up
+1 Huge mistake from non-Yahoo!

------
noelsequeira
This new flavor could end up being the sweet spot between the Delicious we've
come to know and the interesting but relatively niche TrailMeme
(<http://trailmeme.com/>). I can see some interesting hacker focused stacks
emerge that aggregate quality links around, say, getting started with a new
technology or maybe fund raising.

The challenge with "stacks" though, as with any list curation web app, is 1)
maintaining the quality of content and 2) surfacing higher quality collections
as you scale and become more and more inclusive. And these are hard problems
to tackle without having humans sift through thousands of stacks to pick the
diamonds in the rough (Visit <http://www.imdb.com/lists/> to see what I mean).

------
aymeric
Do I need to create a new account or can I use my old account? It doesn't seem
to remember my old username.

~~~
gizzlon
If you didn't pay attention and authorize them to move your data, I guess it's
lost? :(

But seriously, I got like 5 of those.. how did you miss it?

~~~
jasonkester
In that same span of time, how many thousands of emails from other services
you signed up for but don't particularly care about at the moment did you
receive?

That's how you can miss something like that.

For some reason, every business in the world thinks it's important enough that
I am going to be constantly monitoring it to make sure I'm still signed up,
active, don't want all my stuff deleted, etc. But for the most part real
people can go years at a time not caring about services like this, yet still
have a reasonable expectation that their stuff will still be there when they
go back.

As luck may have it, this interaction spurred me to check my Hotmail account
again, because I used it as my backup email address for a few services several
years ago and they have a nasty habit of deleting accounts for inactivity.
Sure enough, all my email is gone. Evidently because it's been a few months
since I logged in. Completely inexcusable, but at least I caught it before
they deleted the account entirely.

Amazing that companies think this is acceptable behavior.

~~~
gizzlon
yeah, I see your point.. I usually quit services that send too many emails.
Maybe I noticed the delicious email because they don't normally spam me.

------
utunga
I was really open to this - to new things and new features.. but then i
started using it for the real day to day things that i already love delicious
for.

Arghh! They seriously broke many key parts of the old functionality - things I
really use and need.

Just praying this is just a launch-now-fix-later type deal.

------
franze
like the good old times

    
    
      502 Bad Gateway
    

but with a new twist

    
    
      nginx/1.0.5

~~~
johnx123-up
Looks like back to Perl? or switched to CI/PHP?

~~~
draegtun
Looking at their _jobs_ page its probably been rewritten in Python:
<http://www.avos.com/jobs/>

------
pushingbits
I switched to delicious from Google Bookmarks some time ago because I liked to
keep things tidy with tag bundles, though I missed the full text search and
delicious is sooo slow.

After the relaunch it looks like they are trying to position themselves to
compete with pinterest et al, but they still have a lot of catching up to do
in terms of UI and they are still soooo slow.

Anyway, using delicious as a private bookmark manager (which is what I was
doing) doesn't seem to be a use case they have in mind for the future. Time to
give pinboard a try, I guess. Maybe I'll learn to live with the tag cloud.

------
cakeface
Its so funny. Through all of the stuff that has happened with delicious over
the past year I've stuck there and been reasonably happy. Today though none of
my plugins work. When I try to go to the ff plugin download page I get a 404,
and I am just not liking the new site.

It seems like to me that the best thing they could have done is show some
stability to people by being reliable and fixing some of the things that were
already broken on the last site before they asked their userbase to take a
leap like this.

------
mikemoka
I hope at least that, if this is actually beta as claimed, they monitor how
this version fares, and if things go for the worst (ie. less users and content
produced in the next month or trimester) they should have the humbleness to
switch back to the old design and improve gradually on it..users made an
investment in delicious during these years and Avos did the same, I don't
think that anyone wants to lose anything, money or knowledge..

------
adulau
<http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html> "Cool URIs don't change" and this
should be applicable to del.icio.us too. The URI
[http://www.delicious.com/network/<username>](http://www.delicious.com/network/<username>);
is now broken... not really a good start if you want to sell del.icio.us as a
social platform for bookmarking.

------
ZTech
Delicious is limited only to storing bookmarks and it would be better if it
were made more comprehensive to cover the various sources of content that we
access on a daily basis. Anybody here tried Zukmo as an alternative ? its a
free cloud based tool to build your Personal Digital Library with bookmarks,
documents, google docs, tweets, rss feeds, notes etc.

------
grantjgordon
What a vast improvement! I've been using delicious for years, and as the UI
has stagnated, the things that bugged me about it have stacked up. Everything
I thought should be fixed, from where padding should be added to how tags
should be delimited, and much, much more has made it into this redesign.
Bravo, guys. Bravo.

------
pkamb
They should (re-)re-brand it back to <http://del.icio.us/>

~~~
mario64
That won't help things. I'm not surprised with the way things have turned out.
Chad hurley admitted in a nytimes interview that he hardly used the site.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/technology/youtube-
founder...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/technology/youtube-founders-aim-
to-revamp-delicious.html?_r=1)

------
lucasjake
Seems like a fun revitalization of delicious, and these guys will have plenty
of resources to experiment.

------
Thrymr
And my profile pic seems to have defaulted to a drawing of a badger? How is
that a useful default?

------
handelaar
I'm especially loving the way they deleted my entire account and everything I
ever saved in it.

~~~
xnxn
Sorry, but that's entirely your fault.

Even if you missed the "please allow AVOS to migrate your stuff" e-mail Yahoo!
sent when Delicious was acquired, you could have easily grabbed a JSON dump of
your bookmarks at any time in the past eight years.

~~~
handelaar
Yeah, cos it can't possibly be that I replied to that in the affirmative and
then I joined the mass ranks of users who just got dropped when this migration
lost a huge pile of data en route.

------
kapilkaisare
I'm not sure I follow.

You buy delicious and then rebuild it from scratch? Why buy it then in the
first place?

What am I missing?

~~~
dongsheng
Plus the massive user base.

~~~
adambyrtek
Kind of, because users had to explicitly opt-in in order to be migrated. I
didn't, and I'm curious how many others followed the same path, either because
they'd already migrated or just didn't care anymore.

------
andrethegiant
If you use Safari and Delicious you should know about
<http://delicioussafari.com/>, it puts all your links organized by tags in the
menubar. You can also add links very easily with ⌘Y.

------
joshu
Feels like this needs more work before we can see where they really wanted to
go.

------
johnx123-up
<http://www.delicious.com/> and <http://delicious.com/> are alive:(

Not sure, why these guys are missing basic thing....

~~~
polynomial
While I understand the usual practice is to redirect one to the other, what is
the reason they both can't be a valid address?

~~~
johnx123-up
Having both schemes will lead to duplicate copies on search engines.

~~~
mikemoka
This is like the ABC of SEO, BUT there is a robots.txt that may keep those
crawlers away..

~~~
johnx123-up
<http://www.delicious.com/robots.txt> and <http://delicious.com/robots.txt> \-
same copy

Apart from SEO, it is also a bad practice. Think of multiple copies spread
across many subdomains without any _purpose_

------
AndrewDucker
So, I can't post from my client any more, ifttt's connection to it also seems
to be broken, the posting bookmarklet isn't doing autocomplete, and the forums
have been washed away.

This isn't a great start, really.

------
figital
initially psyched when i heard this news but hard to see where this is going
so far with most of the previous greatness stripped out. even a url like
<http://delicious.com/stacks/figital> would have previously been
<http://delicious.com/figital/stacks>. maybe they've set this up for
rapid/iterative development but my excitement will last for about another
week.

~~~
jamesgeck0
<http://delicious.com/figital/stacks> would take you to everything you'd
tagged as "stacks." I'm not sure there's a way around that without changing
the tag urls to something like <http://delicious.com/figital/tags/tagname>

------
fleaflicker
Does anybody have any technical details on what backend changes were made?
Seems like a huge effort to migrate all that data.

Really curious what changed and how it changed on the backend side.

------
SonicSoul
let's see.. my "tag" chrome extension stopped working.. so i installed
whatever extensions was most popular (same one delicious uses in their demo
video). that one overrode alt+d (which normally selects address bar text), and
it just saves before giving me a chance to enter any tags. so now anytime i
press alt+d to select text, it just saves that site to delicious w/out any
tags. i really didn't need this. it was working great the way it was.

------
naner
Redesign aside, I've had nothing but trouble trying to use the website and
their browser plugins since they relaunched. I am not a happy camper.

------
damncabbage
I'm sorry to say this, but this may provoke another massive boost for
<http://pinboard.in>

~~~
johnx123-up
No. These guys locked me by borking forgot password:-D I can't export now

------
RexRollman
Sorry Delicious but Pinboard has my heart now.

------
armandososa
I like the stacks feature. Looks like if they were after tumblr sharing
market. I don't see myself using them, though.

------
dongsheng
They removed plenty inactive users, I got my fav username back :D and Yahoo ID
has gone +1, that thing barely worked.

------
mercury888
I just did a search for Kevin rose. Wtf? Where are all the old bookmarks???
They ruined it! There's only 3 results!

------
SandB0x
* Browser plugins broken

* Can't click on a tag and see other users who've saved the URL (which was a very useful feature)

* Amateurish layout

------
spdegabrielle
Mobile safari login fails silently. Arggh. Must look for alternatives.

------
tbrooks
The new Delicious is case in point why you should never write a codebase from
the ground up.

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

~~~
britta
It's unlikely that AVOS had a choice. Several months ago, the former product
manager of Delicious wrote about a few options for its future
([http://uniquehazards.tumblr.com/post/2377362882/we-can-
save-...](http://uniquehazards.tumblr.com/post/2377362882/we-can-save-
delicious-but-probably-not-in-the-way-you)), and he included:

> But ultimately the real challenge here will be the technology. During my
> time at Delicious we rebuilt the entire infrastructure to deeply leverage a
> number of internal Yahoo technologies. It’s all great stuff but not exactly
> easy to remove or replace.

~~~
tbrooks
That's fair.

I guess my larger concern rewriting the codebase, is they lose a lot of
learned assumptions from users.

For example, under the new delicious, if I click a tag in my tag cloud. And
say it takes me to '/photos' and then I click another tag, 'house'. It doesn't
take me to '/house', but '/photos/house' and the page isn't found.

I've probably done this 20x today and the behavior is so ingrained in me that
I can't function with their new UX.

There are other nuances like this that make the new delicious extremely
frustrating.

------
initself
They appear to have broken Delicious Bookmarks for Firefox.

~~~
tdurden
Syncing issue? I found you can workaround this by logging in to
<https://api.del.icio.us>

------
mikemoka
popular links for tags are broken for the moment :
<http://delicious.com/popular/test>

------
joel_liu
What's the difference between delicious and stumpupon now?

------
diamondhead
It's very good to see that delicious is getting improved again. I think that
it'll will be the replacement of search engines in couple of years. It's
chaotic enough to collect information from the web and strong enough to
provide better ways of accessing information.

