Remember Delicious? They rolled out an update today
When Yahoo! launched acquired Delicious it was all about saving bookmarks to a remote location so that you could access them on any computer system with Internet access. The site grew in popularity quickly as it also offered options to explore popular bookmarks or search across all public bookmarks at once, even without account.
Delicious, just like Digg, the other big player back then, dropped in popularity over the years. It is likely that the integration of bookmark synchronization in popular web browsers played a role, but also neglect from the site's parent company.
Yahoo! eventually decided to shut down Delicious, but instead of doing so, it sold the web service instead. The new owners of Delicious have just launched a site update to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the website.
Delicious 2.0
If you have used Delicious in the past but have not been on the site for a couple of months or even years - heck, my last bookmark dates back to 2008 - you are probably wondering what has changed in the meantime.
You will notice that the entire site is now using a single-column layout, with a menu being displayed on demand on the left. It is a streamlined design that puts the focus on links, search and tags so that users can quickly navigate their saved links, links of their network, or from social media.
Other new features include double-clicking on any link to add it to your bookmarks collection or edit it instead if it is one of yours, new tag and tag bundle links at the top of every page, and a personalized discover feed if you link the Delicious account to your Twitter account.
There is more than that though. You can now tag multiple bookmarks at once, access your personal tag cloud again, or look at bookmark stats to find out how popular each individual link is.
Delicious has published a video that highlights the major changes in the update:
New users can import bookmarks using the import feature that is listed in the options. This can be useful to get all bookmarks of a web browser on to the site in one smooth operation.
You are probably wondering who is going to use Delicious? It can be useful if you work on public computer systems at times and want to access your bookmarks on these systems as well. Browser syncing does not do you any good in this scenario.
It may also be handy as a tool to save articles that you are interested in, a read it later of sorts without cluttering your bookmarks or installing an extension to use it.
Closing Words
Delicious is nowhere near as popular as it was years ago, but it is still has a rank of 1103 on Alexa at the time of writing which indicates that it still gets a solid amount of traffic. It is still an option for users who want to save bookmarks on the Internet, or use a third party site to save articles and other website links they are interested in.
Anyone still using Delicious? If so, for what exactly?
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The E-learning Support team at Aberystwyth University has been using Delicious for many years to tag and annotate websites that we want to share with our staff and students, as well as the public at large. We share the links in two ways:
1. If a staff member is interested in using, say, MOOCs, we send a link to our bookmarks tagged mooc. That way, as we tag more websites, the staff member can access the new items easily.
2, Our Nexus website, which has traffic from around the world, features links to our Delicious tags on pages relevant to each topic, as well has having a general link to our account is_alto on every page.
With this new development, Delicious has implemented a redirect so that people clicking on these links no longer go to our tags but to the Delicious account creation page. I don’t understand the reason for this, but we want it fixed or have a work-around so that our links work as intended.
the funny part with Edit Bookmarks is that they are IDIOTS
around 1 year ago they removed the option to edit the bookmark LINK, now you can edit the name, tags and so on, but if you want to change it from a site.com/menu to a site.com than you are f***ed, no option, no way. the only choice is to visit the link, remove the extra stuff – enter – saVe again to delicious, pretty stupid if you ask me
ps. i keep using the service but their best options / usability was on the original builds :(
I used to visit in a daily basis the most popular links, found some great stuff/articles there from blogs I’d normally don’t follow, but that is long gone.
I used many bookmark services, and now only keep diigo and google bookmark.
https://www.diigo.com (features, bookmarking, highlight text w. diff. colors, custom text remark, tags )
Most ipt! part is up-to-date addons for both firefox and chrome.
firefox : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/diigo-web-highlighter-and-stic/?src=search
chrome : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/diigo-web-collector-captu/oojbgadfejifecebmdnhhkbhdjaphole?hl=en-US&utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher
Advanced feature show images and video on your custom site (bookmark sites or any) :
PageExpand
firefox : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pageexpand/?src=search
chrome : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pageexpand/bjnobgdfhefpilajplncgjjeopakpepc?hl=en-US&utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher
I think a screen shot function should be left to specialised tools that can be used in conjunction with dropbox as an ‘app’ and not by dropbox itself.
I use ‘GreenShot’ for example, which already comes with the capability to sync screen shots directly to your dropbox storage account (among other online storage providers), it also comes with many dedicated screen shot oriented features that dropbox does not offer.
…ehh(?), what on earth is this comment doing here.
its supposed to be here:
[ https://www.ghacks.net/2013/09/28/dropbox-2-4-introduces-screenshot-import-feature/ ]
I use Delicious to generate RSS feeds that I push out to a couple different websites. When I use a certain tag, the bookmarked page shows up in one place, a different tag goes to a different website.
At the time — several years ago indeed — I would connect to Delicious more to discover sites than to keep any of my favorites (I don’t travel that much on the Web). I remember as is is stated in this article that Delicious was really the “big stuff”.
Nice to read that it’s starting a new life. I’ll appreciate the bookmarklet they provide should I register again (I had closed my account at the time when the site had changed in such a way that it rendered a favorite Firefox add-on I used, obsolete).
“Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_%28website%29
Thanks, corrected.