Big Update Coming to Delicious!

Posted on December 20, 2012

The holiday season has been especially busy here at Delicious. Mid-December we launched our official Delicious iPhone app and are thrilled with the positive feedback we’ve received so far… but now its time to start looking forward to the new year!

You may recall that last month we began previewing a new design for Delicious at demo.delicious.com. Today, we are excited to introduce some major improvements to the demo site (more details below). This new design will be rolled out to the main Delicious site in early January.

Some of the new product features and notable improvements include:

  • An omnibox search bar to conveniently search across keywords, tags, usernames, your network and even tag bundles!
  • Enhanced profile pages with names and personal bios added to make it easier to find friends and create a personalized link-sharing network of your own.
  • Single-page viewing experience to speed up navigation across your links and to supercharge content discovery.
  • Keyboard shortcuts to get you where you want to go faster than ever.

Thanks to everyone who has submitted feedback on the new design! It’s still a work in progress, so please keep your comments and suggestions coming via the orange feedback button at the bottom of every page.

Until next year, Happy Holidays from all of us here at Delicious!

Official Delicious iPhone App!

Posted on December 10, 2012

We are excited to announce that the official Delicious iPhone app is now available for download in the App Store:

https://itunes.apple.com/app/delicious-official-app/id580295142

The visual style and user experience of the app mirrors that of the new Delicious site design currently being previewed at demo.delicious.com. Not only can users search and add links from their own collections with the app, but they can also search through links being saved by the community and their networks in real-time.

This is the only official iPhone app released for Delicious, and it is completely free to download. Support for Android and tablets are on our near-term roadmap as well.

We value your input in the features and products we develop, so please send any feedback to support@delicious.com.

Hope you enjoy Delicious on-the-go!

Delicious Refreshed

Posted on November 6, 2012

Today we’re excited to offer a preview of the brand new Delicious!


We’re proud of what we built and we hope you’ll like it too! This is just the start of what’s to come. More will be revealed as new features get released, but for now, we wanted to share a few of our guiding principles:

Community Matters
The Delicious community is a passionate bunch – consuming millions of links every day while collecting the best content on the net. In the future, we’ll make it easier for users to not only save their own links, but to discover the most interesting bits and bytes on the web by leveraging the crowd-sourced wisdom of our community.

Need for Speed
We want Delicious to be fast. Really fast! To that end, we rewrote the codebase and streamlined the user interface. Content now renders instantly and can be consumed in a single pageview – making it even easier to navigate the site.

Mobile Friendly
With our new iOS app (currently in development) users will be able to access their links wherever they go, and we have a roadmap in place to improve the way Delicious is consumed across a multitude of devices. So whether you’re an Apple fan or an Android loyalist, don’t worry, we have you covered!

Note: The demo site is still a work-in-progress and doesn’t have all the key features of the current Delicious. It may go down occasionally as we check in code and fix bugs. With that in mind, we would love to hear your feedback so we can incorporate your ideas into the product. You’ll find an orange Feedback button on the right-hand side of the site – please don’t be shy in letting us know what you think!

Without further ado, check it out now at demo.delicious.com!

Cheers,
The Delicious Team

API Update: Link Redirecting

Posted on October 2, 2012

Beginning on October 5th, some Delicious APIs will start returning URLs that redirect users through delicious.com before reaching the final link. Most users will not notice this change, as all links stored on the Delicious website are already redirected through this same pathway.

There are two exceptions for which Delicious will still return the raw (original) URLs in the API response:

  • Requests for exported links
  • Requests for a user’s own personal links

Why is Delicious providing redirect URLs for API responses?
Delicious currently serves  2-3,000 RSS / API requests per second, and is committed to being a free and open service that is safe for all users.  Returning redirect URLs in the API response protects users by allowing Delicious to check all links against a list of spam websites and warn users before entering those sites.

What will redirect URL looks like?
To avoid returning redirect URLs with a lengthy number of characters, Delicious will use the link shortener icio.us.

Who does this change impact?
This change may impact developers who have built applications that cluster links by domain based on the raw URL. Where possible, the API will return a new field, ‘expanded_url’ , that will contain the full URL, for users that explicitly need the unshortened URL.

Tasty Tagging

Posted on September 11, 2012

For this post, we thought we’d continue to share some of the inventive and creative ways that people are using Delicious as a tool in their personal and professional lives. This week, food!

It’s safe to say that the web has revolutionized home cooking. Cooking blogs, recipe websites, and tablets have all but replaced cookbooks in the kitchen, which has advantages and disadvantages. A cook’s collection of recipes cannot just be contained and organized within a single cookbook or recipe box anymore; now it is likely spread across a wide array of blogs and websites.

Many Delicious users have found a creative way to organize their recipes by getting specific with tags. When saving a recipe, they tag all of the ingredients so that when they’re searching for inspiration, they can check their fridge or pantry, see what ingredients they have, and then search for them within their Delicious tags.

Say you’re making dinner and have chicken, spinach, and an onion in the fridge, but you don’t know what you can cook. Simply search Delicious for the tags chicken, spinach, and onion, choose a recipe that sounds yummy, and voila!

Even if you haven’t tagged and added your own favorite recipes, many other users have — making Delicious a fantastic resource for searching and discovering the best user-curated dishes! Have tomato, avocado, and a lime? Okblueberry has you covered! Looking for something savory? Runnergrl has not only tagged her links, but also bundled all of her meat & seafood tags into a single tag bundle, creating a whole other level of hierarchy for her recipes.

Hungry yet? Then get cooking!

User Spotlight: Howard Rheingold

Posted on August 31, 2012

Because Delicious has such an incredibly diverse and vibrant community, we’ve decided to spotlight specific users who are curating content in interesting and imaginative ways.

Members of the education community are some of the most passionate and active users Delicious. For teachers, students, and even whole classes, Delicious can be a powerful tool to stay informed and organized in a field, and to easily pass information along to students, colleagues, and the world at large. Howard Rheingold knows this better than anyone.

Howard Rheingold is an author and educator who has taught digital journalism at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and his own online university Rheingold U, and was one of the original users of Delicious from way back in 2004 when the site was still in beta.

Howard uses Delicious to gather information, concepts, and theories to share with his students. For example, he uses the tag Smartmobs (the name of his 2002 book about the potential of technology to crowdsource global change) to catalog examples of this in today’s world — a resource which is remarkably useful for anyone trying to leverage the web to generate change or to spark a movement.

Howard is also a big advocate for the social advantages of Delicious. One of his top techniques is to use systematic searches and tag filtering to easily dig deep into a topic and share that information with his students. Sharing links with his journalism class on the topic of Twitter becomes as simple as combining two of his tags (“Comm217″ + “Twitter”) and sending them the link.

Another one of his tips is to try to discover experts to follow on Delicious: “Look for popular sites [with] particular tags of interest, find out who the earliest people were to tag those sites, [and then] look at what else they’ve bookmarked.”

Check out all of Howard Rheingold’s links here:
http://delicious.com/hrheingold/

Delicious – Features Update

Posted on July 20, 2012

Our team here at Delicious has been working hard on a number of exciting developments that we can’t wait to share with the community! We’ll have more to say soon about what’s to come, but for now, here are a few updates we wanted to let you know about:

Introducing the Delicious-Facebook Connector

We know finding links you’ve shared on Facebook can be a pain, which is why we’re thrilled to announce the introduction of our new Facebook Connector for Delicious! Much like the Twitter Connector we rolled out in March, our new connector imports every link you’ve ever shared on your wall, and can even maintain the original privacy settings given to your links on Facebook!

The Facebook Connector can be found on the sources page of your account settings. We can’t wait for you guys to try it out!

Consolidating tags and stacks

We introduced stacks last year as a visually rich way to think about your links and we’ve been blown away by the amazing content you’ve created. But given the upcoming launch of new products from Delicious’ parent company, AVOS, and our focus on simplifying the Delicious site, we realized the value of stacks is limited for our users moving forward.

For this reason, we’ve decided to simplify how users organize links on Delicious by consolidating stacks into tags. Users will no longer be able to create stacks on Delicious starting in early August, 2012.

So what does this mean for existing stacks?

  • You will not lose your links.
  • All stacks will be converted automatically into tags. Stack titles will transition into new tag names, and will be applied to all links currently in a stack.
  • Stack-specific descriptions, categories, comments, link order, and stack followers will not be included as part of the migration.
  • Your existing links, tags, and notes outside of stacks will not be affected.
  • More details on the conversion process are available here.

These changes are a direct result of feedback from our community.  We welcome all input – good or bad – so please continue sharing your thoughts, comments, or questions with us at feedback@delicious.com!

We’ll have more to say soon here on our blog about the exciting developments we’ve been working on – so stay tuned!

An update to those users seeing spam in their saved links

Posted on April 2, 2012

Over the last few days, some users have reported that spam links have appeared amongst their saved links. We wanted to post a quick update with more information regarding this issue, and what we’re doing to get to the bottom of things. Here’s what you need to know:

  1. We believe the spam is posting to accounts through an HTTP API endpoint, as well as through d.me, and seems to have impacted several thousand users by posting unsolicited links into their Delicious account.
  2. We have disabled some legacy API functionality, and are digging deeper into the root causes in order to enable some longer term solutions. Future versions of the Delicious API will be based on OAuth 2.0 and not legacy authentication methods – we will notify developers as newer API endpoints are available.
  3. We have temporarily disabled posting to Delicious accounts via email with d.me to close a spam opening.
  4. Users who are seeing random spam amongst their saved links should delete those links. If the problem re-occurs or if there are more than a few please send a few sample URLs along with your username to feedback@delicious.com so we can investigate further.

Apologies to those users who have been impacted; we will post again when we have more details to share.

Tweet a Link, Save a Link

Posted on March 2, 2012

Here at Delicious, we’re actively embracing the idea that the act of “bookmarking” has evolved beyond simply saving links.  By introducing stacks, we took the first step to transition content sharing on Delicious from a simple URL stream into sleek collections of your passions that include your own voice.

These days, great content is shared through a whole smorgasbord of social activities like retweeting and liking.  When you discover an interesting article or video and want to share it with others, you’re most likely turning to a social media site like Twitter.  The need to share links quickly with tweeps while also capturing them for inclusion in a stack led us to our latest feature.

The new Twitter Connector on Delicious gives you the option of tethering your accounts together, so any link you tweet, retweet or favorite on Twitter is also saved to Delicious.  (Note to web speed junkies: sometimes the link-saving process can take a few minutes or more depending on system demands, so be patient!)

Here are some features and benefits of the Twitter Connector:

  • Every link you’ve shared via Twitter in the past (up to the last 3,200) will be imported into your Delicious account. (Delicious will ignore any duplicates)
  • You can choose a link-saving protocol for future tweets, including a) saving each link from Twitter going forward; b) saving just the links in tweets hashtagged with #d; c) saving every link except those hashtagged with #d.
  • You get to assign your own Delicious tag to every link coming from Twitter, and any hashtag included in your tweets (aside from #d) will be converted to unique tags on Delicious.
  • Multiple Twitter accounts can be set up, each with their own discreet settings and preferences.

Sharp-minded Delicious followers might recognize this as the same popular feature offered by Trunk.ly, which we acquired last November.

This is just our first step in integrating Delicious with your current web habits.  We will soon offer features like automatically tweeting your activities and adding more social networks to further streamline link-saving and sharing with your friends.

Oh!  We should mention that the Twitter Connector will be gradually rolled out over the next week. To check whether it’s available to you, visit your account settings page. If you see a “Sources” tab, you’re golden.

Stacks go social

Posted on January 20, 2012

Stacks are a great way to organize and present the content you’re passionate about and add your voice on why it matters.  Now we’re letting others join the fun – stacks just got social.

With the latest Delicious update, you can now:

  • Collaborate on stacks
  • Comment on stacks and suggest new links for stacks.
  • Build stack responses
  • Create private stacks for yourself or a group

To learn more about each, please read on.

Collaborate on stacks

If you build stacks to share with a group, why not invite them to join the fun? Invite others to edit and add links to your stack for a joint compilation of the content you want to share with the world.


Comment and suggest on stacks

Found a stack about the most Atrocious Sweaters? You can now join in the conversation, commenting on individual links or the stack as a whole.

It’s also possible to suggest new links to help the stack creator improve their stack. Stack creators can choose to accept or reject suggestions to quickly and easily include them in their stack.

Stack responses

Why stop at commenting on a stack on when you can create a response? Stack responses allow you create a new stack of links that’s tied to the original.  It lets you add your own voice and show your support, add a different point of view or just plain disagree with the original stack creator.  So go ahead and create a response to educate the community on how Sweaters can be Stylish.

Stacks created as a response also include a reference to the original stack.

Private stacks

You might not always want the full community to see what you’re sharing, which is why we have enabled Private Stacks. You no longer have to publish a stack, instead invite only the people you want to collaborate with and keep it to yourselves. Share links around a project at work, research a new kitchen or share favorite engagement rings with your yet-to-be-announced fiancee.

 

Delicious has always been a social platform, and these new stack features make social an even bigger part of what we’re about, allowing communities to collect and display their passions from across the web.