At one time, Delicious was a useful tool. It was purchased by Yahoo. Yahoo's clueless executives did nothing with it, introducing zero useful new features.
Google is also mismanaging Blogger. While WordPress is heavily updated, Blogger is stagnating. Google has introduced two useful new features in the 4+ years I've been using Blogger. They introduced post queuing, and comment spam filtering. I'm looking forward to switching to WordPress and my own domain and my own Linode.
Yahoo's executives realized they wasted their money buying a website they didn't know how to run. They decided to either shut it down or sell it. A group of investors, including YouTube's founders, bought Delicious from Yahoo.
They promised to finally upgrade and improves Delicious. Their new version finally went live yesterday. It's a POS. They removed all the useful features that I liked.
Here's a press release announcing the new delicious.
Here's a comment that shows what geniuses these people are:
The list of organized tags in the right side is now gone, replaced with a search navigation tool.You're making me search to find my bookmarks now? Great. I'll use Google instead. The tag list was one of the desirable features.
Also, they don't support more than 10 links on one tag or page. That kills any usability.
What geniuses decided "Let's fill up the page with whitespace! That'll make it more usable?"
Let's see. Which design do I prefer?
Design #1:
Link #1 {tags} {edit tools}
Link #2 {tags} {edit tools}
Link #3 {tags} {edit tools}
Design #2:
Link #1
{tags}
{edit tools}
Link #2
{tags}
{edit tools}
Link #3
{tags}
{edit tools}
Come on you twits. Can't you see that design #1 is much better than design #2?
Luckily, I found the "export tool" and downloaded my bookmarks file to my PC.
(BTW, the "new Blogger UI" also has the same "too much whitespace flaw". If Google forces the new UI on me, I may give up on Blogger also.)
Summarizing the flaws in the new Delicious:
- They removed the right hand side tag list. If you're making me search to find my bookmarks, I'll just use Google.
- They don't support more than 10 links on one page.
- They are using way too much whitespace in their page design.
I'm just hand-editing some HTML files and using Firefox's bookmark feature. After one day, I'm noticing that hand-editing HTML is better than delicious was.
There's another bonus of hand-edited HTML. I have control over the order in which my bookmarks are displayed. I can make sub-groupings. Delicious only supports sort-by-name or sort-by-date.
I may check back again in a few months to see if they fixed things. For now, I'm done with delicious. It's now clearly inferior to hand-edited HTML files and Firefox's default bookmark feature.
20 comments:
I agree completely. Well said.
Incompetent people who can't design good stuff steal money and then hostile acquire the good stuff.
They can't resist changing the color of the bike shed, so they then shit all over the design. But since they own it and have made changes, now they can say "I'm the designer that made the famous thing." Even though they are not really the one that made it, they are the one's that fucked it up. But they genuinely believe they own the good part of the thing's reputation, which they had nothing to do with.
On the Internet, your users will desert you if you trash your website. That's how MySpace lost its user base to FaceBook. MySpace was bought by clueless executives with bankster financing.
There are very few websites with true user lock-in. Gmail is nice, but I can switch and give my new address to my contacts. Google is nice, but there's no overhead to switching search engines, except that the others suck.
"Buying a reputation" matters with tangible goods, with many State-imposed barriers to entry. When you have a State-backed monopoly, you keep your customers, even if you cut quality. That doesn't work on the Internet.
But wait, it's worse. I just added a new link to Delicious. When I did that before, I could see all of the old tags. When I started typing a tag, it would auto-complete. Now, I can't see a tag, nor can I auto-complete. I think I'll end up with a bunch of very similar, but slightly different tags (e. g. "ski", "skis, "skiing"). This sucks.
The crazy thing is that making money from this isn't hard. Just run ads on the side. The ads can be "smart" (they can be based on the links I've created). Leave it alone and make money off of it -- it's very simple. Actually, you can add the "stacks" and the stupid image in the corner (will anyone really use that?) and hope those new features catch on. But for the rest of us, just let us organize our hundreds of links in a logical way (which is what delicious has always done) and be done with it.
Google Bookmarks, you say? I've have to check it out. Keep in mind, I'm a lazy user. In some ways, I am the exception to your rule stated in the third comment. I don't want to switch. I am a slow adopter, and an even slower changer (I have my way of doing things, and I get uses to it). But this crappy interface makes we want to take the time to port over everything to Google Bookmarks.
I was thinking of throwing together a delicious clone with PHP and mySQL.
I could even buy some hosting and offer it as a service?
Now that I'm unemployed, I really should move my blog to WordPress, Linode, and my own domain. If I had my own domain and Linode, I could experiment more.
I never tried tagging anything with the new delicious, because the update broke the old Firefox plugin. Taking away auto-complete really did suck.
Anonymouse said: But wait, it's worse. I just added a new link to Delicious. When I did that before, I could see all of the old tags. When I started typing a tag, it would auto-complete. Now, I can't see a tag, nor can I auto-complete. I think I'll end up with a bunch of very similar, but slightly different tags (e. g. "ski", "skis, "skiing"). This sucks.
I second the suckiness. Auto-completing for consistent tagging was the great beauty of old delicious and the main thing that made it truly useful. And I HATE THE UGLY GREEN GRAPHICS. It is the worst color of green ever. It's like what Linda Blair puked up in The Exorcist. And have you seen their video with its faux-hipster music and forced-cheerful announcer. I want to RUN. Is Diigo any better? Way to ruin a good Web tool!
I completely agree...
does anyone knows how to browse the Search by URL function? the old one was easy. I want to see everyone that bookmarked a certain link to find sites similar to the one.
thanks a lot,
R
Oh, delicious what have you done? I'm trying to remain calm, but really. I have been promoting you for years but this is a mess. The "save to delicious" button in the IE plugin now is useless!
Who decided that "automatic save" before I could do anything with the title or description or keywords was a good idea???
Hate the puke green color!
Any idea what i am supposed to click to save my tag changes? Perhaps you could add, hmmm, how about a SAVE BUTTON!!!????
Agree with the above... delicious just went from being really useful to MORE of a pain in the ass to use. No auto-complete. Having to shift to a new entry system. Gah! WHY?
I don't work for delicious. Don't ask me.
I exported my bookmarks and am sorting through it in notepad for the ones I want to keep. I switched to hand-edited html.
Maybe someone from delicious read this post, or they figured out how badly they screwed up.
They put back the right-hand-side tag list and removed the 10 tag limit.
They still have all that lousy whitespace. They should at least give an option for an alternate skin with a tighter spacing.
I lost four years of work without being notified. What happened to my tag bundles? I used delicious as a knowledge bank. Most tags had a description at the top of the page -- gone. I could "cross-index" content and reuse it in a variety of ways with tag descriptions. What a trivial piece of junk. Anybody know how to retrieve my original 13000 tags in their former state? Help.
You can use the "export tool" to download your bookmarks list.
However, you'd have to parse it out yourself.
I really should write "fsklicious".
I would be overjoyed if you wrote fsklicious, really! I've never seen it before, to take away basic functions you expect a certain device to have, and call that an upgrade! The new delicious really sucks. The old delicious was an incredibly useful device.
Now that I'm unemployed, I might move to my own domain. I have more free time now. I might use my accumulated AdBrite earnings to move to my own domain and expand.
That would open the door to other projects, like fsklicious.
Ugh, the new delicious is really terrible. Um, maybe I'm being totally ignorant: is there a way to search your own bookmarks anymore?!? Ach. I don't want to see everybody else's tags, I wanna see mine :-(
Please someone, suggest an alternative social bookmarking site to use.
I seriously considered writing a delicious clone on my new website.
Now that I have a new job, that project is suspended.
It's official: the New Delicious does not suck as much as it did in September. You can see your own links now by logging in and going to "profile" dropdown menu and click on My Links. This will bring you to your most recent links and all your tags on the right, just like it useta be.
The stacks feature is still weird, though. Although, to be fair, I haven't really put it through its pace. At least it sucks less, though. I had filed for divorce from it! Now I'll give it a second chance.
I take that back. It only sucks a little less. WHERE IS MY TAG CLOUD???? The list by number of tags with the cutesy graphic is craptastic.
I haven't been back to delicious since then.
I looked again just now. Yes, is still sucks.
There's still too much whitespace.
I'm still limited to 25 tags onscreen at a time.
The tag cloud is now this screwy scrollbar thing.
I switched to hand-edited html. I may write my own fsklicious at some point.
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