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).
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..
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)
and there appears to be no way to submit the form without clicking the button. Part of the joy of the previous flow was I had the bookmarklet bound to a shortcut, when it opened it auto-focussed on the tags box (with URL and title pre-populated), autocompleted my tags, and enter would submit.
I could be done and on my way without even thinking in around 1-2 secs. This is about an order of magnitude slower and as you mentioned prone to tagging error.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
Moreover, searching for anything old on Twitter is pretty much impossible. Delicious was much better in that you could always search & recall that one bookmark.
After further study: you can't save links privately via the Delicious bookmarklet anymore. I just clicked my "save this link" bookmarklet on an article I was reading (out of some nostalgic impulse), and I expected the usual interface where I could fill out some metadata and then submit it for saving -- but instead, the link was instantly saved publicly to my account, so I had to quickly click the checkbox for "this is private", save again, and then go to Delicious and edit it again to add the metadata I wanted.
Anyway, for people interested in an example of social listmaking done in a pleasantly focused way, Bagcheck is interesting to explore: http://bagcheck.com/ (recently talent-acquired by Twitter).
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?
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).
As the cofounder of trunk.ly and a direct competitor to delicious, I think this new version is one step forward, two steps back.
Social bookmarking is one of the few much under-appreciated services. It offers much longer life-time-value to its users. There are lots of data one can mine. Many needs to satisfy. Chad and Chen's entry definitely revitalize this market. Their "bringing social bookmarking to consumers" is spot on. This is a huge step forward. Over time, I'm sure the service will become better as long as they keep improving it.
Two steps back:
1) The main way to get links into delicious is still via bookmarklet. Given the high ratio of people using facebook, twitter, why should I manually bookmark a link if I have already retweeted it? Or liked it in my little walled garden?
Trunk.ly provides 10+ connectors into popular social networks. Setup once. Links will start coming in automatically.
2) Lack of a solid social search. Playlist for the web is a great concept but will your interior "design" tag means the same to my software "design" tag? Tagging as a device to build taxonomy starts to collapse when people uses same tag for difference things. Quora solves this problem quite well by labouring out a taxonomy of its own.
Trunk.ly provides a search interface so essentially you have your own google for your links as well as your friends.
For example, want to search for stunning infrared photography images?
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...?
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.
111 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadIt's nice when a bookmarking service can be a discovery tool itself.
How was that confusing?
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).
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)
I could be done and on my way without even thinking in around 1-2 secs. This is about an order of magnitude slower and as you mentioned prone to tagging error.
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.
Ouch !
You buy delicious and then rebuild it from scratch? Why buy it then in the first place?
What am I missing?
In any case, Pinboard is the true heir to del.icio.us.
Moreover, searching for anything old on Twitter is pretty much impossible. Delicious was much better in that you could always search & recall that one bookmark.
Anyway, for people interested in an example of social listmaking done in a pleasantly focused way, Bagcheck is interesting to explore: http://bagcheck.com/ (recently talent-acquired by Twitter).
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?
It looks like a simplified delicious.com, a lot of features haven't been implemented. We probably should give them a bit more time.
One thing I hated most is the spaces between entries and spaces between blocks, it makes the page really fat.
Social bookmarking is one of the few much under-appreciated services. It offers much longer life-time-value to its users. There are lots of data one can mine. Many needs to satisfy. Chad and Chen's entry definitely revitalize this market. Their "bringing social bookmarking to consumers" is spot on. This is a huge step forward. Over time, I'm sure the service will become better as long as they keep improving it.
Two steps back:
1) The main way to get links into delicious is still via bookmarklet. Given the high ratio of people using facebook, twitter, why should I manually bookmark a link if I have already retweeted it? Or liked it in my little walled garden?
Trunk.ly provides 10+ connectors into popular social networks. Setup once. Links will start coming in automatically.
2) Lack of a solid social search. Playlist for the web is a great concept but will your interior "design" tag means the same to my software "design" tag? Tagging as a device to build taxonomy starts to collapse when people uses same tag for difference things. Quora solves this problem quite well by labouring out a taxonomy of its own.
Trunk.ly provides a search interface so essentially you have your own google for your links as well as your friends.
For example, want to search for stunning infrared photography images?
This is what you get from trunk.ly: http://trunk.ly/?q=infrared+photography
This is from delicious: http://delicious.com/search?p=infrared+photography
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!).
But seriously, I got like 5 of those.. how did you miss it?
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.
(at the end..)
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..
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.
Incidentally, the Delicious API is still working correctly (albeit slowly) for me.
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.
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.
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.
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...?
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.