Delicious.com, one of the forefathers of social networking, has been updated with a whole bunch of great new features. Finally Yahoo has taken the time to upgrade this ageing dinosaur with a set of fresh new features which embrace real time search, social sharing and provide more relevant information to its users.

Delicious has remained extremely popular with the online marketing community but its appeal to general users has been over shadowed by the likes of Digg, Stumble and Twitter. The “Popular” page generated massive amounts of traffic for anyone lucky enough to be part of the list but finding relevant information was always difficult for the average user. The new updates are set to improve the user experience and include a newly designed “fresh bookmarks” section, new sharing features and an improve search facility.



The most noticeable addition is the integration of Twitter content; you’ll notice that related tweets are now attached to bookmark listings. This is not just a great addition way of monitoring what people are saying about a bookmarked page, it is also an essential part of the ranking process for bookmarks. The new algorithm uses both Twitter and Delicious popularity to generate rankings, which it has to be said, seems a very intelligent method of gauging the importance of a topic. The biggest concern is the potential to spam and manipulate the ranking of Delicious bookmarks. Delicious will need to carefully monitor the ranking process in order to provide relevant results.

The new send tab allows users to login to their twitter account and share their bookmarks directly with their followers. Ok this really isn’t giving us anything new but it does help to improve the sites user experience.

The new and improved Delicious search is perhaps one of the more important updates to the site. The new search features a filter by tag option and displays a timeline of tag performance. This cool new feature could be used to identify tag trends or identify high popularity tags, a very popular addition which will be utilised by the marketing community.

Since Yahoo bought Delicious back in 2005 we have seen little if no major changes to the network. The new updates are an extremely important move by Yahoo to improve the quality of its assets in light of the recent Yahoo Bing partnership agreement.

What we can say is the changes are a massive improvement on the original platform and let’s hope this is just the beginning of a new interest in the development of Delicious by Yahoo.

Article by Creative SEO – Search Marketing Consultant