A New Flavor... Still Delicious
avos.com
avos.com
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
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).
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.
* 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.
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.
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
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.
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..
And is it just me or did their default bookmarklet add those silly stacks, but drop tag autocompletion?
no, its not just you! its done it for me too! its so frustrating! My browser crashed when I tried to create a stack!
Pinboard/delicious has some vital advantages for me – first, it works across browsers, so whether I'm using Chrome or Firefox, I can still access them. Never mind bookmarking something from an iOS or Android device…
Also, the UI for doing that is a lot better, tagging, search etc. Some stuff you bookmark is a simple "read later" or "read on another device" list, but I do it for lot of articles and sites that might come in convenient some vague time in the future.
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!).
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.
Ouch !
It's nice when a bookmarking service can be a discovery tool itself.
I've been using this Delicious bookmarklet for Chrome (http://www.techlifeweb.com/2008/09/11/delicious-bookmarklet-...) 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.
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).
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..)
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.
502 Bad Gateway
nginx/1.0.5After 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.
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.
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.
You buy delicious and then rebuild it from scratch? Why buy it then in the first place?
What am I missing?
Not sure, why these guys are missing basic thing....
Apart from SEO, it is also a bad practice. Think of multiple copies spread across many subdomains without any purpose
This isn't a great start, really.
Really curious what changed and how it changed on the backend side.
* Can't click on a tag and see other users who've saved the URL (which was a very useful feature)
* Amateurish layout
> 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.
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.