Delicious team unveils new version of the social bookmarking site

Avos, the new owner of social bookmarking site Delicious, has dusted off the previously neglected service and unveiled a slick revamped version today — complete with new features and functionality.

The changes mark the first major updates to Delicious since the height of the site’s popularity, despite being owned by giant tech company Yahoo from 2005 to May 2011 (when Avos purchased it).

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“We realized that in order to keep innovating over the long term, the eight-year-old site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up,” the Delicious team wrote in a blog post announcing the new site. “The result is a new homepage, interface and back-end architecture designed to make Delicious easier to use.”

One major change to the site is a new feature called Delicious Stacks, which are collections of links that can be shared with others. The company calls it “playlists for the web”. Stacks can have custom images, titles, descriptions and comments for each link. For example, podcasts that reference news from around the web can create a Delicious Stack of links for each episode or for the entire show.

Some minor additions that make the site easier to use have also been added in the revamp. For instance, tagging something is much more in tune with other bookmarking features. The old method of tagging treated each word as a separate tag — meaning “Doctor Who” would have to be entered as “DoctorWho”. The new site, by comparison, allows people to use tags with multiple words and supports commas (instead of spaces) as a way to add multiple tags to a particular link.

The revamped Delicious also supports profile pictures, which should make the overall experience more personable.

And while the term “bookmarks” has been replaced with the term “links”, they essentially function the same way. Also, something that carried over from the old version of Delicious is support for all Delicious APIs and feeds. The company said it plans to add more API support in the future.

However, not everyone is happy with the changes Delicious’ new owners have made — namely the changes to the site’s navigation.

“I like the design, but where are all my tags? I have my bookmarks arranged alphabetically, but that doesn’t appear in the new design,” a long-time Delicious user commented on the company’s new demo video posted on YouTube.

To access the list of old tags, users have to click-through to their profile. The list of organized tags in the right side is now gone, replaced with a search navigation tool. Also gone are the number of links (bookmarks) that show how many times a person has used that tag.

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“You’d think a site hoping to attract new users and more traffic by changing things up a bit and improving it would — in fact — go and improve their site,” said another YouTube commenter, sterlingman. “I understand we’re back to beta — but fix it, please!”

Check out the demo video of the new Delicious site embedded below.