San Francisco — Pioneering social-bookmarking outfit Delicious, the early Web bookmarking site that Yahoo acquired in 2005 and discarded earlier this year, now under new ownership, is staging a comeback with a blend of old features and new additions.
As suggested by Avos, the company from YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, on Tuesday re-activated the popular social bookmarking service Delicious, though they acknowledged that it is still a work in progress.
The duo admitted to being a bit anxious about the launch, referencing a Back to the Future quote in which Marty McFly wonders, “What if they say I’m no good?”
“We feel a bit like Marty McFly, of “Back to the Future” fame today as we launch the new Delicious. After securing the service from Yahoo! in April, we realized that in order to keep innovating over the long term, the eight-year-old site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The result is a new homepage, interface and back-end architecture designed to make Delicious easier to use,” according to a blog post from the Delicious team.
However, the re-energized cloud-based Delicious (no longer addressed as del.icio.us, as it was in 2003 when it was created) has a bit of a YouTube touch to it, as you will be greeted with bright images when visiting the site and lots of options to view YouTube and other videos.
Besides, Delicious is pushing the novel concept of Stacks, or playlists for the Web, which are basically compiled by users and are viewable as links, images or video, via a “media view,” and allows you to collect videos and links about a particular topic and publish them in one central location.
And here is what it looks like:
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{japopup type=”image” content=”images/stories/demo/2011/sept/youtube-founders-a.jpg” title=”image” }Click to enlarge… {/japopup}
As always, if you wish to stack all the reviews about the iPhone for example, you can compile review of the smartphone by saving them via the Delicious browser toolbar button and maybe throw in a YouTube video of Apple’s latest iPhone commercial. Once you have collected all your links, write a description, choose images, click “create stack,” and your digital collage is ready for viewing.
“Our goal with stacks is to deliver more value to all the links being grouped by the Delicious community. Each new stack presents an opportunity to introduce the rest of the world to cool web content they have not seen before,” Delicious said.
“Every day, people create boatloads of content on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and across the entire web,” the team says. “It is getting increasingly difficult to filter through all the noise. If you know exactly what you are looking for, search works great, but what if you want to discover something new? Conversely, how can you easily organize the best websites around a topic you know a lot about?”
The team also assured simpler navigation, with redundant features consolidated. Bookmarks are now called links, but they are the same thing, and any links previously marked as private will remain that way. The company said it is still supporting all Delicious APIs and feeds, with more on the way. Multiple word tagging and profile pics are also now supported.
“Much more work will be needed to realize our vision: keeping the essence of Delicious–the premier social bookmarking tool–while building upon its core functionality to create a great discovery service, too,” the company said.
The video below explains how these works with the example of “why mustaches are so awesome”. You find various related links around the web and find a nice collection to create a stack. It is pretty simple really.
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