Yahoo gives Delicious more speed, fewer punctuation marks

Yahoo has revamped Delicious, saying the site for storing, describing, and sharing Web site bookmarks is faster, easier to use, and has better search abilities.

The updated look to Yahoo's Delicious Web site for storing, searching, tagging, and sharing bookmarks. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Yahoo)

The speedup comes from a new server system that's snappier and more reliable, Yahoo said on its Delicious blog on Thursday. "You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of 5 million users," the company said.

But for me, half the productivity gains will come from a rebranding of the service. No more will my fingers trip over my keyboard trying to type "del.icio.us," the old name of the service, because Yahoo now is calling it just plain old Delicious. (And conveniently conforming with CNET's ages-old spelling in the process.)

"We've seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of 'del.icio.us' over the years (for example, 'de.licio.us', 'del.icio.us.com', and 'del.licio.us'), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends," Yahoo said. The name change also means users will have to log in again.

The older Delicious limited descriptions of bookmarks to 255 characters, a cap that gave some appeal to rivals such as Ma.gnolia, but the new Delicious raises it to 1,000 characters. However, the Firefox plug-in I'm using to tag sites still imposes the 255-character limit.

Though Yahoo is working to unify its profiles, Delicious accounts are still separate from those at Flickr, Yahoo Mail.

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo in June.

Here's Yahoo's official word on the changes:

Speed: We've moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable...

Search: We've completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they're very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another user's public bookmarks, or your social network. Now it's easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we've updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we're hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.