San Francisco — Yahoo’s social-bookmarking service Delicious unveiled a suite of revamped homepage features that are intended to collect and rate recently bookmarked links every minute, including a linkup with the white-hot micro-blogging community Twitter to give it a more real-time flavor.
With today’s upgrade, Yahoo is porting that real-time vision to Delicious. This feature is now noticeable under the new and default Fresh tab.
“Early in January I released a simple application called TweetNews, which essentially ranks the latest Yahoo! News articles by their number of related Twitter messages to determine relevance for really fresh content,” recalls Yahoo Software Architect Vik Singh. “We considered as to where else we could apply this model, and in such a short period selected a Yahoo property that we felt could benefit greatly from a social-freshness lift: the delicious homepage,” he said.
On the old delicious homepage, links typically ad about a hundred bookmarks. This meant less prominence for fresh news.
Delicious functions like a Web browser’s Favorites or bookmarking tool, but users can access saved pages from any Internet-enabled device as well as share links and see what others are bookmarking. A new tab named “Fresh Bookmarks,” which replaces the old “Popular” tab, displays links to the stories bookmarked in Delicious that are trending high on Twitter.
Delicious now features “Fresh Bookmarks” that highlight recent, much-discussed links.
“For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media,” explains Singh. “Underneath the hood, Fresh contributes several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, “eats our own dogfood” by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as couples tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs (as ~81% of tweets do not contain URLs). Try clicking the “x Related Tweets” link for any given story to see the Twitter conversation appear instantly inline.”
In addition to the new homepage, Delicious offers some new search tools, which apart from allowing users to e-mail or tweet links from the Delicious site, rather than the previous iteration, where stories could only be shared externally by cutting and pasting links, it also enables you to filter by tags and time-frames, and see historical save trends of bookmarks. They apparently plan to go into more detail about this in a future blog post.
Delicious boasts more than 6 million users and about 150 million unique links on its site.
Among the other enhancements Yahoo has introduced to Delicious is a multimedia feature that enables things like in-line playback for YouTube videos and Flickr to appear with the links on the site.
“Although we are just getting started, we do hope this new homepage further demonstrates the freshness, newsworthiness and social relevance of Delicious — and maybe gives you a greater reason to come back to delicious.com more often,” Singh said.