Saturday, August 09, 2008

Delicious Gets Even Tastier With Age

It's been two years today since I started using del.icio.us and my love for the site continues to grow! Read my prior posts on the joys of the site & social bookmarking in general.

This anniversary is well timed as the web service has just been relaunched, and happily I'll never have to type that name with all the weird punctuation again as the site is now just Delicious.

The new features are mainly along the lines of increased performance, improved search, and a new design. Others have written about the changes, so rather than add to the noise on the issue, here are my Delicious bookmarks on this topic.

Delicious has always had a simplicity of design that made it a breeze to use. Things have changed a bit and like any redesign it takes old users some getting used to. But overall, it seems that things are much easier and quicker to use now. (My only beef so far, is it's now much harder to bundle unbundled tags.) It also looks classier too - less like a mess of plain text as it did before.

Considering how much I love Delicious and that it seems to be getting better, you'd think I'd be happy. But a few nights ago, I lay in bed dreading that as Delicious still doesn't seem to have a viable model for making money it could shut down. My nightmare with Delicious is Yahoo (owner of Delicious) will do what they did when they shut down Yahoo Photos and encouraged me to move my photos to Flickr. Yahoo Photos, unlike Flickr, was a great free service. Yahoo Photos let me host tons of photos and organize them into albums, etc. With Flickr, after importing all my Yahoo Photos pix there, I was horrified to learn that my old photos were now locked away from me and I can only view the most recent 200 unless I pay. I also have to pay to create more than 3 albums. Flickr basically sucks now, so I have moved onto PhotoBucket. But my old photos are dead to me on Flickr. I hope Yahoo doesn't one day do this to my Delicious bookmarks. Photos are nice to look at, but I can't live without my bookmarks!

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