As a co-founder of trunk.ly and a direct competitor to delicious, I think this new version is one step forward, two steps back.
One step forward
Social bookmarking is often a very under-appreciated service. It offers a longer life-time-value to its users, but is not always immediately useful. There is lots of data that can be analysed and many different user needs to satisfy. The new owners, Chad and Chen, also founded Youtube, so their purchase and redesign of delicious definitely revitalizes this market. Their idea of “bringing social bookmarking to consumers” is spot on and one we’ve been working towards as well. The new Delicious is a huge step forward and over time, I’m sure the service will become better as long as they keep improving it.
Two steps back
1) The main way to get links into delicious is still via bookmarklet. Given the high ratio of people using facebook and twitter, why should I manually bookmark a link if I have already retweeted it? Or liked it in my little walled garden?
Trunk.ly provides 10+ connectors into popular social networks. Setup once and links will start coming in automatically.
2) Lack of a solid social search. The playlist for the web is a great concept but will your interior “design” tag mean the same as my software “design” tag? Tagging as a device to build a taxonomy starts to collapse when people use same tag for different things. Quora solves this problem quite well by labouring out a taxonomy of its own.
Trunk.ly provides a search interface so essentially you have your own google for your links as well as your friends. There’s no need to tag – you can if you want, but you don’t have to in order to create value.
For example, want to search for stunning infrared photography images?
- This is what you get from trunk.ly: http://trunk.ly/?q=infrared+photography
- This is from delicious: http://delicious.com/search?p=infrared+photography
