Stacks go social

Posted on January 20, 2012

Stacks are a great way to organize and present the content you’re passionate about and add your voice on why it matters.  Now we’re letting others join the fun – stacks just got social.

With the latest Delicious update, you can now:

  • Collaborate on stacks
  • Comment on stacks and suggest new links for stacks.
  • Build stack responses
  • Create private stacks for yourself or a group

To learn more about each, please read on.

Collaborate on stacks

If you build stacks to share with a group, why not invite them to join the fun? Invite others to edit and add links to your stack for a joint compilation of the content you want to share with the world.

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Comment and suggest on stacks

Found a stack about the most Atrocious Sweaters? You can now join in the conversation, commenting on individual links or the stack as a whole.

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It’s also possible to suggest new links to help the stack creator improve their stack. Stack creators can choose to accept or reject suggestions to quickly and easily include them in their stack.

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Stack responses

Why stop at commenting on a stack on when you can create a response? Stack responses allow you create a new stack of links that’s tied to the original.  It lets you add your own voice and show your support, add a different point of view or just plain disagree with the original stack creator.  So go ahead and create a response to educate the community on how Sweaters can be Stylish.

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Stacks created as a response also include a reference to the original stack.

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Private stacks

You might not always want the full community to see what you’re sharing, which is why we have enabled Private Stacks. You no longer have to publish a stack, instead invite only the people you want to collaborate with and keep it to yourselves. Share links around a project at work, research a new kitchen or share favorite engagement rings with your yet-to-be-announced fiancee.

 

Delicious has always been a social platform, and these new stack features make social an even bigger part of what we’re about, allowing communities to collect and display their passions from across the web.

 


Update on the browser extensions

Posted on January 15, 2012

In the past one of the ways of working with Delicious has been the browser extensions. For users of those extensions, it’s been frustrating that some of the features are not working.  There’s also inconsistency between the features in different browser extensions.  We want to clarify our position on the extensions and where we are going from here.

The original developers of the extensions did not anticipate Delicious users with thousands of bookmarks. As users noticed before the AVOS acquisition of Delicious, the extensions can at times transfer so much data that they cause problems with internet connections and browser stability. Rewriting the extensions to avoid these problems will take time and resources.

The challenge this creates is that our focus is on innovating and moving Delicious forward.  We are re-building it into a site that once more attracts millions of people to enjoy the best content the web has to offer.  How the Delicious site works and operates is changing. It will continue to grow and change more quickly and this is where we are directing our efforts.

We recently reviewed the status of the extensions. Rather than keep people “hanging on” in the hope that we will work on them soon, we want to be up front about the following decisions we have reached:

  1. We’re putting the extensions “on ice”.  We will remove some broken options to avoid having non-functioning features deployed. This point is most relevant to the Firefox extension which always had more features than the others. Beyond this we have no current plans to continue developing them.
  2. We will promote the bookmarklet as the best way to interact with the site.  For the next few months this is where users will experience and see the changes we are bringing to delicious.

If you already use a browser extension and are happy with it, then this has no impact on you.  If you want to experience the best that Delicious has to offer with the new features and changes we are launching, then we recommend that you use the bookmarklet.

We do believe extensions still have a place, but at the moment our priority is to focus resources on the experience at the front end of the site.  We’ll review the role extensions play with Delicious in several months time once the front end experience has further matured.

EDIT: Updated the link to reflect the new tools page location.


Chrome Browser issue that prevents bookmarking some sites with the bookmarklet

Posted on January 8, 2012

A small number of people have noticed problems when bookmarking sites like YouTube in the Chrome Browser with the Delicious Bookmarklet.  We’ve received confirmation that this issue is a problem with the latest release of Chrome when certain Chrome Applications are installed and also affects many other sites that have a JavaScript based bookmarklet.

When a Chrome Application like the Chrome YouTube Application is installed, it intercepts its URLs before the bookmarklet can see them causing the bookmarklet to fail.

The only work around we know at the moment is to delete the relevant Chrome Application (for example if you can’t bookmark YouTube links, make sure the YouTube Chrome App is removed).

This remains as an open bug with the Google Chrome development team, we’ll be sure to let you know if there is any change.


New email notifications and more dynamic stacks

Posted on December 23, 2011

New email updates

While Delicious has feeds for most of the content that people add, not everyone likes to use a Feed Reader.  Email can be more convenient for some notifications.

To provide you with choice in how you receive information, we’ve now added optional email notifications for some key events.  For example, now when you follow a stack, you can be automatically emailed whenever the stack owner adds a new link.

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You have full control over these emails and can turn notifications on and off on the settings page.

Farewell “kitten man”

A persistent stack image on the home page over the last two weeks has been one we affectionately refer to internally as “Kitten Man”.

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We’ve improved the way we select stacks to make it more dynamic which means there are now newer, fresher stacks for you to discover on a more frequent basis. Sadly “Kitten Man” no longer holds top billing, however if you can’t get enough you’ll find his stack here.

Finally, Happy Holidays!

From all here at Delicious, we wish you safe holidays and a Happy New Year.  Here’s to a New Year full of Delicious treats!

- Lucy Bain, Programmer


Performance release and brief downtime between 8PM – 10PM PST tonight

Posted on December 22, 2011

We’ve just pushed a new release which will resolve most of the performance issues we’ve been experiencing over the last couple of weeks.

To complete this update, we will be rebooting the database servers between 8 pm and 10 pm PST on Thursday, December 22nd  (4 am-6 am GMT on Dec. 23rd).  This will cause the site to be slow and potentially unresponsive for short periods while caches rebuild.

All of the servers have been upgraded and an additional caching layer (to serve content more quickly from memory, rather than having to look for it on disk) has now been implemented.  We’ve also expanded the existing caches with more machines.

Along with the performance changes, we’ve also included several small fixes, including tightening up the white space on the link lists further, selected text is once again added to the description when using the bookmarklet and other minor changes.


Minor enhancements and performance issues

Posted on December 20, 2011

We promised last week that upgrades will start to happen more frequently as we move onto the front foot with making Delicious the best place to discover and collect the web.

Site performance issues

As we’ve been introducing more features and Delicious starts growing again, underlying performance is increasingly becoming an issue.  We are currently working through caching issues in order to handle the high volume of RSS and API requests we receive daily.

We’ve made some changes which are helping, but there is still more to do.

We are also expanding our team to dedicate more operational resources on a 24×7 basis to ensure the site always performs at its best.  If you, or someone you know are interested, please refer to our jobs page.

Easier to browse and share stacks

Stacks are now even easier to browse, with Next and Previous buttons that hover as you scroll down the page allowing you to scan through stacks inside a category.  In addition to sharing via email, you can now share stacks directly to Twitter and Facebook.

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In Summary

We’re not standing still, we continue to actively listen to and consider user feedback.  This latest release also includes many small visual and consistency tweaks in response to feedback, a fix to the Firefox Bookmarklet to get better consistency of tags and lots of other small improvements.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working on building ways of enabling you to work together on stacks, streamline the stack experience, integrating more of the functionality from Trunk.ly and continuing to improve and refine the overall experience on delicious.com. We’re also aware of an issue where YouTube Video pages can’t be saved in Chrome using the bookmarklet at the moment and we’re looking into it.

- Vijay Karunamurthy, Chief Engineer


New Look on Delicious

Posted on December 13, 2011

We’ve received a lot of helpful suggestions from the Delicious community, and if you mosey on over to Delicious.com, you’ll see we’ve been listening.

Updating the Design

We’ve begun a comprehensive overhaul of how the Delicious UI deals with information density and hierarchy, while applying a clean, consistent style. Giving Delicious an interface flexible enough to add new features moving forward was a strong consideration. It required us to take into account overarching themes like how content types get presented (stacks, links, actions, and so on) to minute details like a consistent button style.

Here’s an example of the old link-saving page compared with the new one:

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Enhancing Discovery through Stacks

At the top of our priority list was exploring new stack layouts, to help visitors discover content. There were a number of considerations that went into formulating the new stack design, with the end goal of making the content more compelling including:

  • More prominent comments from the stack creator to add a greater level of personalization
  • A more informative presentation with better content previews, to give a clearer sense of what’s behind each click
  • Better media display that showcases quality images and compelling video
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We also wanted to make it easier for you to find stacks centered on your interests, so we’re now categorizing them into areas such as Comedy, Food, Music or Sports. These categories will be revised and expanded over time.

 

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We’re going to continue looking for better ways to present stacks, and would love to hear your thoughts on this latest push. Drop us a line with your feedback.

Delicious has been a work in progress since the beta re-launch, with our attention primarily on completing the migration from Yahoo!. We’re focused now on innovating Delicious to empower web discovery, and actively building the team and dedicating the resources to make it happen. New features and site updates will start rolling out more rapidly, so keep watching this space.

- J.T. Trollman, Lead Designer & Alex Dong, Senior Software Engineer


AVOS Acquires Trunk.ly to Enhance Link-Saving in Delicious

Posted on November 9, 2011

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San Mateo, CA – November 9, 2011 - AVOS Systems, which recently re-launched Delicious.com and is led by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has acquired link-saving service Trunk.ly.

Trunk.ly was founded in December 2010 by Tim Bull and Alex Dong, and is focused on making the bookmarking process more automated and supported by intuitive search. Trunk.ly collects every link that users share or “like” on websites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and stores them in one place to make them easy to find.

“It became clear from the first discussion with Trunk.ly’s founders that our visions for the future of bookmarking and discovery were closely aligned,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “Their technology and insights will accelerate link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious.”

“We’re excited to join this stellar team and apply our bookmarking innovations to help Delicious users discover and collect the web,” said Tim Bull, co-founder of Trunk.ly.

More information on what this acquisition means for Trunk.ly users can be found on their blog.


It’s as easy as d.me

Posted on November 7, 2011

Do you love visiting Delicious, but hate typing all those letters into your address bar? Well, you’re in luck, because now all it takes is four keystrokes: d.me.

We’re always looking to simplify how people can access and use Delicious, and a shorter URL brings a number of benefits, such as a more concise way to point to your Delicious profile: d.me/chad, for example.

Saving Links via Email

We’ve also added a way to save links by emailing the URL to an @d.me address. This is particularly useful for saving on a mobile device. Simply include the link in the body of your email, and use the subject line for your link title. You have the option of adding a comment, tags and privacy designation in the email as well.

Each user will have a unique email address to send links to, in order to let you send from any email. To create your own email destination, visit the “@d.me” section of your Settings page and enter an alpha-numeric code after your username. Be sure to save this email in your address book so you don’t have to remember it.

Then, next time you’re browsing on your mobile device, adding a link to Delicious will be easy like Sunday morning. Just select the option to email the link…

…enter any additional details and send to your @d.me email…

…and all the information will be saved in Delicious.


We welcome all feedback on making email saving better, and will continue adding new capabilities over time, such as saving multiple links from one email.There is also a new way to add a bookmarklet to your mobile browser. To see the details, visit our updated bookmarklet page.


More Updates:
  • We’ve started testing network feeds on select Delicious profiles, and hope to make networks available for everyone over the next few weeks.
  • The process for creating stacks has been streamlined, so try building a new one and let us know what you think on the Forum.
- Scott Bendar, Senior Software Engineer

The First 20 Hours

Posted on September 27, 2011

It’s been quite a day. We launched the new Delicious a little before midnight last night, and it was amazing to watch new stacks being created and links being saved on our site just minutes later. Now it’s 20 hours later, and thousands of stacks have already been created. Thanks to everyone who gave stacks a try – please keep sending us feedback on what you think of the experience.

Speaking of feedback, we were thrilled to get so much of it today. Delicious is in “back to beta” mode, after all, and we’re depending on users to help us improve the interface and track down bugs. We spent a lot of time reading user emails and comments across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and anywhere else we could think to look. All of it was helpful, and we responded to as many people as we could. For those who haven’t heard from us directly, hopefully this blog post will address your pending question or concern.

First and foremost, all previous Delicious users should know that if you agreed to transfer your data to AVOS, all that information is secure. If you’re not seeing all your bookmarks right now, it’s because we made a late decision to limit the amount of data we initially transferred from Yahoo!. We’ll be restoring all the data into your profile in the coming weeks. We should have made this limitation clearer to everyone from the outset, and I want to apologize for any headaches it has caused or will cause.

Beyond that, our engineers are drilling down on specific issues we’ve heard since the re-launch. We already completed these fixes:

  • RSS feeds working (fixed a DNS issue)
  • Fixed password reset process
  • Resolved bugs in feeds that were blocking link rolls

In addition, we’re working hard to address other issues that users mentioned today, including:

  • Fixing browser extensions in IE, Chrome and Firefox
  • Adding in tag bundle functionality
  • Increasing the number of links per page
  • …and many more

For the latest on the status of our features and functionality, your best bet will be to check the Delicious FAQ on our Help page, which will be updated regularly. We’ll also keep you updated on site progress through this blog and the Delicious Twitter feed and Facebook page.

This was an exciting first 20 hours for us, and there’s much more to come, so keep on saving and stacking those links!

- Vijay Karunamurthy, Chief Engineer