On July 31st, the new Delicious.com finally launched. I consider myself a fairly heavy user of the service, with over 4200 bookmarks and 3700 tags. It’s something I use on a daily basis, so I noticed the new version almost immediately. My first reaction was “wow” but after using it for the last few days, I’m not so excited about it anymore.
What it all comes down to is that there just isn’t anything new, besides a fresh coat of paint. At least the Delicious team didn’t try to hide that in their post about the changes:
The new Delicious is just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.
They dropped the dots, cleaned up the UI, and made the backend faster. I appreciate all of those changes, but I’m somewhat disappointed that there’s nothing new and exciting for me to play with. The “new” domain has actually worked for a long time now, and the old domain will continue to work, so that’s not much of a change. The new layout and UI can be best described as “long overdue”. I guess I’m happy about the performance improvements, and I have definitely noticed it, especially when searching.
Apparently the changes will allow the team to make improvements faster, but only time will tell if that is actually the case. I think Delicious could definitely use some work around the social networking aspect of the site – starting with allowing me to specify a profile picture! They could also probably do a lot with recommendations and trends, to help me find things I might be interested in.
Even though the new Delicious has launched, I feel like I’m still waiting.
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