Delicious relaunches with mix of old and new
The social-bookmarking site that was facing possible closure at the hands of Yahoo is now poised to start its next chapter.
Social-bookmarking site Delicious, under new ownership, is staging a comeback with the help of old features and new additions.
When users first head to the newly relaunched Delicious, they'll find much of the same. The branding is the same, and, as before, finding links to bookmark is as simple as inputting a URL from the site or clicking the service's bookmarklet, which can be added to the browser toolbar. From there, users can assign links a title and tags, and share them with others on the site.
I had the chance to take Delicious for a quick spin, and the service is just as easy to use now as it was prior to the relaunch. In fact, users who might have left Delicious years ago and want to come back will feel right at home.
But even though the fundamentals are the same, it's the addition of a new feature, called Stacks, that Delicious is pushing most of all.
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In a blog post yesterday announcing the relaunch of Delicious, the company's team called Stacks "playlists for the Web." The idea behind Stacks is for users to head out on the Web to find links, videos, and pictures around a given topic, and combine all those into a "stack." From there, those stacks can be assigned names and shared with other Delicious users who can then follow it to see any subsequent updates.
"Our goal with stacks is to add more value to all the links being collected by the Delicious community," the Delicious team wrote. "Each new stack presents an opportunity to introduce the rest of the world to cool Web content they haven't seen before."
Over the last several years, Delicious has been experiencing significant turbulence as it has tried to find its way as a link-sharing site competing against services like Twitter and Facebook that make it easy for users to share links. Things recently became so bad at Delicious that last year, the company, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, was in danger of being shut down by its parent company. In response, the Delicious team said that it was trying to keep the site open, and was "talking to companies" in the hopes of being acquired.
In April, AVOS, a company started by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, acquired Delicious from Yahoo. AVOS said that it planned to "add new features and grow [Delicious] overall."
So, far things seem to be going relatively well at Delicious. Some of its most popular Stacks have been viewed nearly 3,000 times, and several top links have been saved thousands of times. But as Delicious knows all too well, succeeding on the Web is a marathon, not a sprint.