Delicious Reimagined: Can They Make it?

The rise and fall of Delicious is a well documented case. It’s a classic example of how a fan favorite Web 2.0 app fell from its grace after acquisition by a corporate giant. Delicious was a phenomenal product no doubt, but years of mismanagement and neglect let an entire crop of new age bookmarking apps take center stage.

The much publicised and criticized sunset of the app by Yahoo didn’t help matters either. Majority of users have since jumped ship using the free import tools offered by competing apps and many even paid up for similar services like Pinboard. Now, team Delicious has introduced a revamped look of the app sprinkled with a couple of new features. Is it good enough and can they make it in the over crowded market of bookmarking apps of today?

Overview

For those who haven’t heard of the app, Delicious is basically a bookmarking service. The web app lets you instantly save your favorite links, collect your discoveries in stacks, share what you find, and dig deeper into your favorite topics. With Delicious you can save, stack (more later) and share the web. It’s one of the pioneers of modern day bookmarking and they did a darn good job during their heyday. The web app is free to use and is extremely simple to sign up too!

Ease of Use

Developers are promoting the new stacks feature left, right and center. This reflects in the dashboard too. But we shall proceed at our own pace and check out other features first. To make the most out of the app, download and install a browser extension. Extensions are available for all modern browsers and you should find the right fit for your favorite browser too.

Using the Browser Extension

I installed the Chrome extension and was glad to see that the plugin recognized the cookie and logged me in instantly. Those who have used a bookmarking extension in the past will find nothing new. In addition to the tags, notes and privacy fields, there is an option to mail the link directly to your friends. Saving links on delicious not only makes it easy to find them later for your own use but also to share them with anyone. Alternatively, as you’re browsing Delicious, click “save” next to any link or stack you find interesting to add it to your collection. It’s simple as that!

Stacks

Delicious team define Stacks as the playlist for the web. It isn’t a tall claim, but you will have to put in a whole lot of work to compile a playlist in the first place. To put it simply, stacks is a collection of bookmarks that fall into the same category.

To create a stack you don’t have to do anything special. Just go about bookmarking links at your own pace. Then when you find a connection between the links you have saved, make relevant notes and tags.

Then hit the Create a Stack button, add a title, few lines of description and add atleast three links. You can reorder the links as you please and if you change your mind later, they can rearranged then too.

The stacks page looks gorgeous and you can add an image to make it more attractive. You can add as many links as necessary and arrange them in any order you find relevant. The stack can be viewed in three different ways and the media view is particularly brilliant.

When you are completely satisfied, hit the publish button for all the world to see. It’s really helpful that the developers have integrated analytics, indicating the number of views and follows a stack has received. To delete a stack click “continue editing” and use the “delete” button to do the deed.

Featured Links and Stacks

In my opinion, the major attraction of Delicious is the massive collection of featured links and stacks. These featured listings are usually the collections of users like us made public for the benefit of others. Note that by default all items bookmarked are made public, unless you check the Private field in the bookmarklet or browser extension. It’s a great place to know about cool stuff and to pass some quality time. Delicious is no StumbleUpon, but is an interesting destination to find something new.

Final Thoughts

I still remember the days when Delicious and Digg were such a rage. All the cool kids of the block were using it and they had ton of positive buzz every single day. I had only a few bookmarks stored in my account, but those were the days when I wanted every single piece of information on the hard drive and not in the cloud.

No doubt, the new version of the app is good looking and is extremely functional. But will I go back to their fold? Never. It’s not that they have lost the mindshare, but, the app isn’t very useful in the era of Springpads and Evernotes. To make a dent, Delicious has to come up with something revolutionary, a shiny new wrapper just won’t cut it!

Share Your Thoughts!

Where you a Delicious user who moved to a different bookmarking app? Are you missing the good old days of using Delicious or have found better alternatives?