On first blush, it's underwhelming. A lot of monotone flatness, which I'm sure hit some kind of trend that got it greenlit, but doesn't make for good UX.
The interface is a solid wall of text that makes it very hard to distinguish one link from the next. There's no signposts to make it easy to tell where you are, or what you're able to do.
I ran through the bookmarking process, and it's clunky. Still asks you to tag things, only now things like the suggested tags are gone, meaning you have to think even more about what you're doing as you save bookmarks.
There's nothing really new that I can see, just a coat of paint and a lot of gratuitous flatness. Flat for flat's sake is definitely this year's skeuomorphism.
Full disclosure: I work with a clipping service that might be considered a Delicious competitor. (But I'd have the same critiques even if I didn't).
It's been a year since last I was there, and it looks like they're halfway back to where they were when they bought it.
I can find links to a website by typing its name into a search box now. I can see a list of my own links now. Those are nice improvements (or dis-catastropic-mistakes) over the last version.
I still can't sort search results by anything other than, well, randomness it seems. Certainly not by number of points. Maybe by date of the last save?
So yeah, halfway there. Even the font is halfway between the terribly oversized font from the redesign and where it belongs. I once got 20 links to a page. Then I got 4. Now I'm back to 9, which at least looks like a list.
I'll check back in a couple years to see where they're at. But I'm not going to start using them again. Fool me once, and all that.
I don't think they had a good product manager. I quit delicious a few months ago because of their lack of support of browser add-ons. It takes less than one week to develop a good add-on for Chrome!
Another disturbing thing was the UX: delicious was slower in 2013 than in 2009...
Sorry, I can only bash them: it is hard to do a business around Delicious but destroying what worked is irrational. The delicious app for Android goes in the right direction but it's late.
The only thing that kept me on delicious is an unofficial android app (droidicious, if I recall correctly), that keeps all the functionality of their old site. It's ridiculous to the point that I send my browser tabs to my tablet so I don't have to suffer the horrid bookmarklet (pet peeve: add all common tags; are they stupid?)
Don't understand why they are trying to fix what was not broken. Delicious was a fast and easy-to-use UI for social bookmarking.
Over the last 3 or 4 years they made their UI progressively worse: replacing spaces for keyword separators by commas, slower autocomplete and now barely visible input boxes. Delicious has been extremely unkind to it's longtime users.
I cannot understand why Delicious team doesn't implemented collaborative filtering [1]. I think this is the main benefit that the user can get from a social bookmarking site - the ability to see the "bookmarks of others that are similar to your bookmarks". The implementation is not too complex and nicely covered in the book [2] with examples in Python. The book even has a special section "Building a del.icio.us Link Recommender".
If I'm not mistaken, there were prototypes for doing collaborative filtering of Delicious dataset written by standalone applications. But doing such filtering requires direct access to the database and cannot be done efficiently via HTTP. So, after the current team had bought Delicious from Yahoo, I thought that implementing collaborative filtering would be their main priority. Instead of that, they concentrate forces on worsening and cluttering UI experience along with breaking various Delicious bookmarking plugins for popular browsers.
I gave up on Delicious years ago. These days I use http://bookmarked.us/ which is the opposite of "social". It stores your bookmarks in your browser (using IndexedDB) and synchronizes with Evernote when YOU tell it to.
It also has the fastest/best sort-bookmarks-by-tag mechanism I've used which is really my entire reason for using it. I should know: wrote it! :D
It's free, there's no ads, and it works offline.
Also, if you want to bookmark something from Android (which is always a pain without writing an app) you can just "share" any given page into Evernote under the "Bookmarked.us" notebook and it will magically appear in your bookmarks the next time you sync.
we need so..oo more than saving "links" now. We need full text searchable full page archived. Maybe including the audio/video as well.
Think the last time you saved a page on twitter/facebook but just few hours later the OP decided to delete or hide the post.
And perhaps facebook-like graph search based on metadata extracted from page. E.g. search a archived page talking about presents published before 2013 Christmas, author's name is vaguely start with letter J, from website XYZ
- Permanently stores the link and its full content within seconds
- Takes a screenshot of the page
- Saves the entire HTML for full text searching (like a private search engine of just your links)
- If the bookmark points to a file it downloads a backup copy of the file
- Creates a backup copy of YouTube and other videos that I drop to myself so that I never lose them (This is the feature I upgraded to a paid account for because free accounts get lower quality video backups and it's the same with screenshots. I wanted high quality everything.)
- Connects to Dropbox and copies all of my bookmarks, screenshots, and video / file backups to a folder in Dropbox
- Lets me email links to myself to save them
- Lets me share with other people who have an account
- Notifies me with a text when somebody else sends me a link (I use this all the time, I get random links from people throughout the day)
- Lets me organize, filter, and sort my links like an inbox specifically for links
- Emails me a list of links I've received at a regular interval
- Has a Pinterest-style grid view option
- Works on my phone
- Can send links to Facebook and Twitter at the same time through it
- Can save links with one click using bookmarklets for my folders
There's more, but those are the main features that I think make it worth using. Check out the site to see a better feature list.
It does exactly what I need it to by acting as an endpoint for my links.
If I want to save something and make sure I can find it again later I drop it to myself on Linkdrop which also backs it up to Dropbox. Very useful in my opinion.
We save full, searchable text with each "clip," and let you snap a box around whatever part of the page you'd like for your image. The image you clip is also shareable by itself, or as part of a board, if you make one.
We don't have a graph search like you describe, but I'd be interested to hear more about your idea!
We haven't monetized yet. I'd prefer to do a subscription plan with some pro features for workgroups. We're not comfortable with things like ads or selling data, and don't think that's a good long-term solution.
I've been using Diigo [0] for over a year (since switching from Delicious) and it works well for archiving pages and searching.
For me its killer feature is being able to highlight passages on the page and add sticky notes to annotate what I'm reading. An archived page on its own would be useless if I couldn't remember why it was important.
I actually have considered doing this as a wordpress plugin. The amount of times I have linked to something only to have it die later and loose the content is quite high.
A service to do this would be nice, although I cannot see myself paying for it so not sure how you would monetise.
hosting could be solved by using third parties, like Dropbox, GDrive, etc.
Actually you can monetize it well. You provide free crawler service (like parsing deep link pages to static ones), users save the content with their private storage provider, and you can sell service to another customer, $5 each at a time for retrieving a dead link
I've pretty much stopped using any bookmarking service. If something is important enough for me to remember, I file it away into one of several files (my custom categorization system).
For example, if I come across an interesting JavaScript library, I add it to javaScript libraries along with a sentence or two that gives it good context for why I should be interested, what problem it solves, etc.. Someone recommends me a movie?
I access all these files quickly through nvAlt that syncs to DropBox so I can acess from all my devices.
I found that no matter what service I was using, delicious, springpad, etc., I was only hoarding links and never really using those tools to look them back up. I was essentially "saving" them to satisfy some hoarding need or something. Often, it is just faster to do a Google search to something I remember saving, too.
Agreed, I have no motivation to create a new account just to see what they've done with it now. I used Delicious for many years, but they just seemed to completely lose direction. All I wanted was a simple bookmarking tool and Pinboard is perfect in that respect.
Same. I can't see any reason to explore whatever Delicious became after the neglect of the Yahoo years.
Even if Delicious advertised themselves as "exactly what we used to be!" I'd still stay with pinboard, because pinboard boils it down to an excellent utility. I was always struggling with Delicious to maintain my privacy settings, and it was tedious in the extreme to maintain and cull bookmarks.
And now I see in a cousin comment that pinboard has an upgrade available for a yearly fee, that archives content of bookmarked links. That makes me very happy, because it gives them revenue beyond the "one small fee for life," and makes it possible that they will outlive me.
Pinboard: it just does what it does, and very very well.
Same here. Pinboard had a great site, great design, and just did the 'one job' very well when Delicious misstepped, and took a lot of their users. I've been using it for 1+ years now and love it. #alittlelatetotheparty
I feel like Delicious was trapped into thinking they were just about "bookmarks" and never were able to really articulate or grow into a more mature service.
Consider them against something like Bitly - which presents itself as a link shortening service, but is really an analytics company.
I've always felt like Delicious could have grown into this much more fantastic organizational or promotional tool, but instead went far the other direction in trying to make the service into a "social news" site instead.
This re-launch is nice and a good step, but seems like too little too late.
Too late a change for me. Completely lost my trust when they lost about 1000 bookmarks during the move/reimplementation post-Yahoo. Happy(ish) pinboard user.
I don't think the problem is UX at this point - or even features as many others have pointed out. The issue for me is that the community left, or certainly isn't close to being the same. I used to go to Delicious for the same reason I currently visit HN - to see what's interesting today. Without a strong group of people posting interesting things on a regular basis, I am just not incentivized to keep coming back.
It's great, much better than before. Hopefully they continue to improve the service.
They don't seems to have a lot of users anymore tough. When you bookmark, you get the number of person who bookmarked before you and it is usually very low ...
On first blush, it's underwhelming. A lot of monotone flatness, which I'm sure hit some kind of trend that got it greenlit, but doesn't make for good UX.
The interface is a solid wall of text that makes it very hard to distinguish one link from the next. There's no signposts to make it easy to tell where you are, or what you're able to do.
I ran through the bookmarking process, and it's clunky. Still asks you to tag things, only now things like the suggested tags are gone, meaning you have to think even more about what you're doing as you save bookmarks.
There's nothing really new that I can see, just a coat of paint and a lot of gratuitous flatness. Flat for flat's sake is definitely this year's skeuomorphism.
Full disclosure: I work with a clipping service that might be considered a Delicious competitor. (But I'd have the same critiques even if I didn't).