Delicious, the early Web bookmarking site that Yahoo bought in 2005 and discarded earlier this year, is back with a bright new look.
While bookmarking is so last decade, a notoriously static way of recalling your favorite places on the Web, Delicious is being re-energized and re-imagined by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. They bought Delicious from Yahoo in April via a new company in San Mateo called AVOS (that is hiring, by the way).
"We feel a bit like Marty [McFly, of "Back to the Future" fame] today as we launch the new Delicious. After acquiring 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.
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The new cloud-based Delicious (no longer del.icio.us, as it was in 2003 when it was created) has a bit of a YouTube feel to it, as you’ll be greeted with bright images when visiting the site and lots of options to view YouTube and other videos. Collections of links, or what Delicious calls Stacks ("playlists for the web"), are compiled by users and are viewable as links, images or video, via a "media view." Delicious might have some gatekeeping work to do, as I was greeted by recently created Stacks on not only "Travel on a budget" and "Fashion blogs," but also "Free live sex – webcamsex" and a rather eye-catching image.
As always, Delicious can be used to tag (even using multiple word tags, such as "Network World") and share links. Profile pictures are supported, to encourage social networking via the site.
I signed up for Delicious years ago, but my account apparently got killed off somewhere between then and now, as I rarely used it in recent years. I signed up for a fresh account today and built a couple of quick Stacks, which is easy to do (although I found the images I had a choice to attach to links were limited, so hoping Delicious will provide more flexibility on that front down the road).
Follow Bob on Google+. Oh, and on Delicious, too.
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