New Delicious by Youtube Founders Now Live

The new Delicious is now online, and just like traveling back in time, it’s back to beta.

After acquiring the service from Yahoo! in April, 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 new Delicious now has a new homepage and easier-to-use interface. It used to have a geeky look-and-feel but now it seems to be more social and open.

Applying the idea of playlists, the Youtube founders saw an opportunity to introduce this concept in the new Delicious website and they called it stacks. Watch the video to get started.

Stacks are collection of links that you can group together and share just like a Youtube playlist. You can customize it by choosing the image to feature, you can arrange the links and add description for the your Stack. It is a curator’s bestfriend. When you visit Delicious you are presented with popular stacks first, and on another tab, popular links. The focus now is curation of related links, not just links.

Bundles are gone but your old links and tags are still intact provided you agreed to opt-in to let AVOS export or transport your Delicious bookmarks to the new Delicious. Fortunately, I did not organize a lot of bundles so I’m not affected. If you are a heavy bundle user, give stacks a try. They are so much more intuitive to use.

Fans, networks and subscriptions are now gone as well. Delicious adopted the concept of following. Basically you can follow stacks or users just like how you follow lists and users in Twitter.

I was surprised that adding a profile picture is not supported in Delicious before but now the new Delicious already supports this feature!

Multi-word tags also works in new Delicious so you can tag links with “social media” or “to do”.

As for the browser extensions, I tested Firefox and Chrome its the basic functionality in saving links are still working. The removed features are not working obviously and the new features like stacks are still not available. Right now, I advise users to use the new Delicious bookmarklet. It looks like this:

Since Delicious is back in beta, we should wait for further developments. Stacks is a clever new feature and I like it. Whether Delicious will gain more fans, we still don’t know but the new version might get Delicious new followers.

Delicious was originally made by Joshua Schachter and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Youtube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen bought Delicious last April this year when it was put up for sale by Yahoo. The new Delicious is the first major overhaul of the popular social bookmarking website after several years of stagnation.