Tuesday, September 27, 2011

The new Delicious - Please give us our features back!

I love the online bookmarking tool Delicious.  I use it very heavily for work (I use it to write this weekly newsletter), and I also use it to save links to things I want to buy, things I want to do at the weekend and so on.  I've even used it to find hotels - basically Delicious users are a pretty smart group, and if a few of them have bookmarked a hotel's website then it's probably going to be a good hotel.

However Delicious as a service hasn't really changed much since it first started.  There was a re-design about 4 years ago, I think, but nothing really since then.  Yahoo announced earlier this year that they were going to close it or sell it, and I was very pleased that two of the founders of YouTube had decided to buy it.  Meanwhile I've also started to use other services, like Pinterest (for visuals) and Instapaper (for long articles).

Today Delicious introduced the new version.  It's a lot more visual, and they're encouraging you to make 'Stacks' - essentially playlists of items.  Here's a video to explain how it works.



However, in doing this they seem to have messed with some of the core features, and the more visual look is making it much slower.

Here is some feedback I've left on the YouTube video:

It's a lot slower than it used to be

It doesn't seem to auto-fill tags when I save things any more

The Chrome 'Save in Delicious' plug-in doesn't seem to work any more

The tags need to be alphabetical

Have you deleted tags? I'm pretty sure you have (or maybe they're not all showing).  For example, I have the tag SanS which I used to bookmark good places in San Sebastian.  It's still there (luckily) but it's not showing on the right hand side.

It would have been nice to have had warning of a switchover date, so that I could have exported everything just to be safe

Most importantly, how to I get to the second page of my links?  E.g. I have a 'Page 2' option at the bottom of my main page, but not at the bottom of my page with 'Mobile' tags, for example.

(I've also heard that tag bundles (collected groups of links) have been deleted, but thankfully I never used these)

Here's an interview with Chad Hurley in AllThingsD - but it's pretty clear that the interviewer isn't a Delicious user, because none of these points have been brought up.

Update - I've now tried creating a Stack - this one is called FMCG Examples.  It's pretty good, but it's quite hard to put your old links into a stack.  It's as if they designed it for new users rather than the existing users.  Also, why can't the URL be delicious.com/digitalnews/stack/FMCG_Examples rather than http://delicious.com/stacks/view/QpyhvK#m=full

4 comments:

Nick Burcher said...

I had 2 accounts. 1 no longer seems to exist, the other one won't sort the links in date order (even if you use the Newest / Oldest buttons.)

Hope they sort it out...

Dan said...

Yes - I really hope they do. It's a massive blunder, and vandalism if they've deleted accounts and links.

It does show what can happen with free services though - if you don't pay for something you have no rights if they lose or delete your stuff.

They'd said that they were consulting with some high-end users over their proposed changes, but I don't think they can have if this is what they've ended up with.

It just doesn't work in it's current form.

Dan said...

From the 'Help' section:

"My migrated links are all screwed up! / Some of my links are missing!
Yikes! That obviously should not be the case. Please let us know if there were data migration issues with your account so we can track down the source of the problem. Send an email with your Delicious username to migration."
migration@avos.com

Unknown said...

yep - I can't see the cloud issue but slower, doesn't try to auto compete tags (now it wants you to add commas, step back?), and I can't see who follows me - just who I'm following, which again is a loss of info that can be handy to know.
I'm sure they'll fix the browser plug ins and make it easier to publish stacks. Needs more work to recover old features but do you suppose with g+ and fb they really had to get up and running asap?

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