September 27, 2011

delicious cloudsI guess it's "complain about website redesigns" week here on rubbercat.net! I have written before about social bookmarking website Delicious, now free of its Yahoo! owners. They announced a redesign/rehaul at midnight last night, and I eagerly clicked the link only to be greeted by a bunch of 502 errors. When I could finally get on, I was inundated with a bunch of "stacks," which are collections of links with MORE MEDIA. It looks like an interesting feature but I doubt I'll ever use it. Then, I discovered that basically all the functionality has been removed from the site and replaced with a bunch of whitespace. Currently, I can't see all my tags (just the top 20 or so), there's no way to change the amount of links on one page, you can't see who saved a link (just the first person), editing my "profile" doesn't work, the title bar says "Delicious.com - Discover Yourself!" on EVERY page (isn't that a big web no-no?), I can't see links from my network unless I click each individual person, getting to my bookmarks involves two clicks (well, one "hover over a drop-down menu" and one click), clicking on "oldest" doesn't actually take me to the oldest page (???), and more fun surprises I haven't discovered yet, I'm sure. Now, it's probably unfair to criticize them at this early juncture, since they say they're working on adding the features back, I'm really not sure why they couldn't have waited until all this stuff was taken care of instead of pushing out this redesign RIGHT THIS SECOND.

The previous incarnation of Delicious was one of the most beautiful sites on the web. It was nice to look at but it still had a ton of functionality under its deceptively simplistic exterior, and I'm sad to see that site go. It's good that the new Delicious is trying to appeal to more people instead of remaining a niche utility, but it's coming at the expense of alienating their existing users.