Social bookmarking web service Del.icio.us has just launched their much anticipated version 2.0 and has officially rebranded themselves as Delicious (sans dots). The relaunch of the best social bookmarking site out there brings a slicker user-interface, enhanced performance and upgraded search capabilities.
The team over at Delicious describes the changes as…”just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.” Sounds like a decent upgrade to me.
Here is a little more detail on the 3 major changes with the new Delicious.com.
- Speed: New site infrastructure focuses on loading pages faster now and as the website continues to grow past its 5 million current users.
- Search: Delicious site search is completely overhauled with a focus on speed and relevancy. As any Del.icio.us user can attest to, doing a internal search was a tedious process that usually took awhile to load results. Not any more – search is now instantaneous and more relevant. The new site search expands into other areas when returning results, including not just a users tags but also other bookmarks and outside social networks.
- Design: Obviously this is the first thing you notice when you hit Delicious.com. The new design focuses on improved usability and enhancement of the new features. Here are just a few of the changes that went live: new navigational organization, auto complete and sorting functionality, new bookmark layout, top 10 tags and new bundles.
So bottom line…what do I think? I like it. The new UI is solid and they didn’t go overboard with changes. For me, nothing is worse then when a highly used service goes through a complete redesign that confuses users. When it comes to the new enhancements I haven’t spent to much time going through them all, but from what I see (especially with search) the new features are great. Job well done, to bad it took you so long to get it live.
