Chris Gilmer , Thursday, July 31st, 2008

In the works ever since Yahoo! acquired the company, over two years ago, Delicious drops the periods and refreshes its look. For real! And for all the people that still bookmark online (you have to be out there somewhere), these changes are impressive.

We got to take a sneak peek and play around with an early version of Delicious 2.0 last September, and we very much enjoyed it. The interface was more visually appealing, and it seemed like a highly polished tool and not so much like a basement build. Not that anything was initially wrong with it, the functionality and benefits to using it were there, but it did need some freshness. Almost two years later, we are presented with the rollout of Delicious 2.0.

So whats new? First off, no need to remember where all the periods went. This domain is simple, delicious.com. As for your bookmarks, they will all still work. The team has concentrated on three main items, speed, search and design. So lets evaluate:

Speed - Sure, it seems like the new servers are working. Bookmarks and pages load fast and things seem pretty acceptable.

Search - Search is ok. Nothing notably special. It does return expected results (quickly) that make me happy, and maybe that is all it should do. The search interface on the other hand, just don’t think its as user friendly as it could be. Searching ones own bookmarks requires selecting from a dropdown on the search button. It was still not that evident that I had selected to search my own bookmarks. I would like to see the Search button get changed to “Search My Bookmarks” when i select that, instead of grayed out text in the search field.

Design - V1 was good. Nice and clean feeling and uncluttered. I was worried that the Delicious team might make the mistake of adding unnecessary “things” to the page. But was happy to see that they had not. The design is kept simple, and easy to navigate. Being that money has to be made, Delicious now displays ads. Boo. But hey, if they have to in order to keep the service free to use, then I will support their decision. They dont stand out and I’m sure I wont mind overlooking them.

In all, good update. Only one question… why did it take this long?