Now that we’ve gotten some housework out of the way, we’ve been able to spend the first few weeks of 2010 finishing off some new features and correcting some long term annoyances. We think you’ll enjoy these, a lot!
Bookmark Display options
The Delicious bookmark display options were spread all over the page and subsequently there was more than one place to control how you view your content. So we combined them all and placed them to the right of the Tagbar, just beneath the bookmark count.
Privacy filter: This has been requested so many times and unfortunately put on the back burner in place of other features. We figured it was time for it to finally hit the streets. You can now filter your bookmarks by Only Private or Only Public.
Send recipients: (display of for:, @twitter & email addresses): The community is clearly divided on whether or not they want this information displayed or not, so we decided to give you the ability to ’show’ or ‘hide’ that information. If you don’t want to see the history of who you’ve sent bookmarks to, you can hide them.
Open bookmarks in: Something else that both you and the Delicious team have been divided on. Should bookmarks open in the same window or a new tab? Well, we thought we’d let you decide want you want to do.
Tag options
Somewhat related to Bookmark Options, we also moved the ‘Tag Options’ out of the blue action box and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed. Here you get the same functionality as before, it’s just closer to the tags.
Browse these bookmarks
We’ve created a new feature that saves you the trouble of bouncing back and forth from Delicious when viewing more than one bookmark in a row.
Click the new link in the action in the upper right hand corner of a users page to see it in action
The feature opens the first bookmark and displays a small frame at the top of the page. From here you can paginate forwards through the bookmarks.
We’re still working on the feature and more functionality will be added over the coming months, but based on how useful we’ve found it, we wanted to give you a chance to start using it sooner rather than later. We’d love to get your feedback on this feature and suggestions for other features. We know what we want to add to it, but your responses will help us gauge what we should work on adding next.
Beyond these features we’ve improved the tag management functionality on our mobile site and while you might not notice the changes, we also fixed 50+ other minor bugs here and there.
What next?
There are a few long outstanding pet peeves that we want to get addressed before we tackle some of the larger projects planned for 2010. There will also be some more tweaks to current functionality that give better access to the great content we all help generate everyday, not to mention the ability to look up and connect to other friends that use Delicious. All of this we hope to give you before the end of March, plus a few other benefits we know you’ll love, but can’t spill the beans on just yet.
Keep bookmarking!
Simon
nosivadnomis · nosivadnomis
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Since adding Yahoo! account support last month we’ve been working hard to increase the integration and start offering more Yahoo! features. New users will automatically share their public content with Yahoo! Updates as well as Delicious, so even more of your friends will get to see the great content you’re saving with the Delicious community. For those of you with Yahoo! accounts, you can go to Settings>Manage Account and enable the sharing functionality with the ‘Manage who sees your Updates’ link on Y! Updates.
For those of you that had a Delicious account and a Yahoo! account (like the whole Delicious team), we’ve added the ability to replace your Delicious login with your Yahoo! account. Go to Settings and select the new ‘Merge with Yahoo! account’ option to stop using your old Delicious credentials and instead sign in with your Yahoo! ID. Don’t worry, the link to get to your content won’t change. If delicious.com/i_am_awesome was your link before, it will still be your link after.
Enjoy!
nosivadnomis · nosivadnomis
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That’s right, after a few years under Yahoo!’s wing we’re finally ready to start supporting Yahoo! ID and increase our reach for Delicious and Yahoo! users together. So for those of you who held off Delicious registration because you didn’t want yet another combination of username and password that you’d never remember, you can now register a Delicious account using your Yahoo! ID! Just head here and make your bookmarking life easier. If you know a Yahoo! user without a Delicious account, be a friend, send them this link: https://secure.delicious.com/register
We’ll be starting the process slowly with just new users to Delicious for now, and a few short weeks later we’ll offer existing Yahoo! and Delicious users the ability to merge their accounts.
As we’re staggering the release, there might be a few bumps along the road but nothing too serious we hope. Unfortunately with a change of this magnitude there will always be some surprises and confusion for both new and existing users. However even with this potential, we do believe we’ve made the right choices that will lead to a long term win for both Delicious and Yahoo!. You’ll see more evidence of that as we approach the end of 2009 / start of 2010. As always, we’d love to get your feedback on what you think and we definitely want to know what you’re hoping this new change will bring to Delicious. Your opinions help shape the product we all use.
Speaking of which… Twitter OAuth? Yes, we heard you. We’ve added OAuth support. Go to your Settings page now and ‘authorize’ Twitter to avoid interrupting your URL tweeting when you save later on.
simon · theteam
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For our most recent release we have a mixed bag of improvements and new features.
Search refinement and graphing – narrowing results by 1 day?! In some cases that might as well be a year! You can now narrow from the previous limit of 1 day, down to 5 minutes. Try it for yourself here.
We also noticed that quite often while narrowing your search criteria, it can be extremely frustrating to not get the exactly level of granularity you want. Most sites give you some pretty plain text boxes on their advanced search page to refine your search by dates, but we figured that was sooo 1995! So, we also added an interactive graph for periods more than 24 hours from the current time. Just click the graph, select the start and end points and click the ‘search’ button to refine your search by the highlighted time frame.
m.delicious.com has now been optimized for iPhone users. You now get a much richer bookmarking experience on the go. You can now save links too! Great for those days you seem to be spending all day sat on a train or at an airport. Use your to:read tag and read all those articles you’ve been meaning to read. Alternatively, see what’s popular on the ‘Explore’ page or search for whatever happens to pique your interest.
Graphs galore - It seems as though great minds think alike, and while we were coding this, we got requests for it too. The graph that appeared on the search result page is now available on the URL details pages and our new Tagometer badge! High fives for everyone!
URL Details - All of the data that was once just stuck in a very boring list is now available for you review at a quick glance. Click the save count for one of your bookmarks and then click the graph icon to expose the graph. See an example here.
Tagometer badge – The badge we offer for placement on your blog or website has also been updated to indicate the number of saves over time a via graph too. And you thought that “I am 5″ badge was cool… Get your updated Tagometer badge here.
Who, what, where? - In the last release we added the additional sharing functionality. Now you can see who you sent those bookmarks to with the addition of light blue recipient tags to your bookmarks. Just click your ‘@twitter’ recipient tag and see all the bookmarks you sent to your Twitter account or all the Flickr links you emailed your mother. To avoid confusion, these tags won’t be displayed when you edit your bookmark, but you can resend to additional recipients and they will be appended to the bookmark.
Enjoy!
Simon Davison
P.S. Yes a few bug fixes made it in too… ;)
simon · theteam
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At the SIGIR 2009 conference, we had the great fortune of learning about a new academic research project that aims to discover the top authoritative users and links in social networking services like delicious. We were so impressed by the work and its wide array of applications that we asked the researchers to write a guest post here describing their findings. — Vik Singh
By Michael G. Noll and Ching-man Au Yeung
A major problem of the Internet today is that finding high quality information is not easy nor fast. The steady increase of spam and junk content on the Web further complicates this challenge. Another related issue is that finding knowledgeable and trustworthy users on social platforms like Delicious is much more difficult than it should be. Wouldn’t it be nice if Delicious recommended “good” users with similar interests? Or wouldn’t it be helpful if you could get a selection of great websites on jewelry or mortgage without being overwhelmed by spam?
To tackle this problem, we created the SPEAR algorithm. SPEAR (Spamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) is a new technique to measure the expertise of users by analyzing their public activities on platforms like Delicious. In the case of the latter, this means analyzing the timeline of the bookmarking and tagging activities of users. The focus of SPEAR is on the ability of users to find new, high quality information on the Internet. A great benefit of SPEAR is that it returns two very useful sets of results: first, a list of users ranked by their expertise; and second, a list of websites ranked by their quality. So, whether you are looking for experts on Delicious for the programming language JavaScript or want to find the best websites on photography, SPEAR can help.
On top of that, the algorithm has been shown to be very resistant to spamming attacks. We tested the SPEAR algorithm using data from Delicious - over 71,000 Web documents, 0.5 million users, and 2 million shared bookmarks. We set the algorithm to find JavaScript experts, for example, and it produced a list of users; the top two were professional software developers, and not a single spammer was ranked in the Top 200.
Technically, SPEAR is based on the well-known information retrieval algorithm HITS, a technique presented in 1999 that is used by search engines to rank Web pages. We came up with SPEAR by modifying HITS so that it fits to the characteristics of open and shared systems like Delicious and extended it with a new component that integrates the timeline of user activities into its analysis. This resulted in further performance improvements of the algorithm (refer to Figure 1 below).
The two main elements of the new SPEAR algorithm are:
1. Mutual reinforcement of user expertise and document quality: A user’s expertise in a particular topic depends on the quality of the documents she or he has found, and the quality of documents in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have found them.
2. Discoverers vs. followers: Expert users should be discoverers – they tend to be faster than others to identify new and high quality documents. In other words, “the early bird catches the worm” (see also Figure 1). SPEAR gives more credit to users the earlier they find high quality documents.
The combination of both these elements has the effect that SPEAR favors quality over quantity of user actions, and that the algorithm is quite resistant to today’s spamming attacks.
We believe SPEAR is very useful in the context of open systems, particularly, social networks. That said, we are already researching the next version of the algorithm – the popularity of online services like Delicious is rising, and so is the spam threat. Whether we want to improve the user experience on Delicious or win the arms race against spammers, there’s still a lot of work left to do!
Figure 1: The SPEAR algorithm gives more credit to early discoverers of new information. How much credit each user receives depends on a so-called credit score function, which is supplied as a parameter to the algorithm.
Figure 2: The main technical components of the actual SPEAR algorithm are a weighted adjacency matrix and two score vectors. The vectors keep track of the expertise score of users and quality scores of documents, respectively.
About Michael Noll
Michael is a researcher and bi-national Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany, and the University of Luxembourg. His research interests are mainly within the fields of the Social Web, information retrieval and information security. He enjoys tackling difficult problems and solving them in practice, particularly with free and open source software.
About Albert Au Yeung
Albert is originally from Hong Kong, and is now a final year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. His PhD research project focuses on how implicit semantics and qualities of entities on the Web can be uncovered by analyzing the collective user behaviors on social Websites such as collaborative tagging systems. His research interests also include online social network analysis and linked data on the Semantic Web.
Related Links
SPEAR homepage, http://www.spear-algorithm.org/
Michael G. Noll, http://www.michael-noll.com/
Ching-man Au Yeung, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~cmay06r/
“A Better Way to Rank Expertise Online”, Technology Review, 07/09, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23100/
Vik Singh · vik
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Earlier this week Delicious released a series of significant improvements and each day this week we spent some time exploring each of these improvements. This post concludes our series of deep dives.
A part of the fun of discovering something new on the Web is sharing it with friends. We’ve made it easier to share your bookmarks on Delicious when you use our Firefox extension or bookmarklets. Instead of copying and pasting an URL, you can now email or tweet your bookmark directly from Delicious.
How it Works
Previously, sharing a bookmark with another Delicious user required using a particular syntax or copying and pasting the URL into an email or tweet. Now, you can share it directly when you save or edit the bookmark. To share a bookmark, simply add recipients in the new Send field when you save or edit the bookmark. Click the Send field and you will see the Send tab with social network options.
If you don’t want to share a bookmark when you save it, you can simply click Save (after entering a few tags) or hit the Return/Enter key on the Delicious Firefox add-on.
Sending a Bookmark
You can add any of the following types of recipients in the Send field:
Email address. Enter any valid email address. We’ve included an auto-complete feature for email addresses you’ve previously entered to make sending emails easier.
Delicious user name Enter any valid user name. We’ve include an auto-complete feature for Delicious users in your network.
Twitter. Type Twitter to share the bookmark on your Twitter feed. Associate a Twitter account by logging into Twitter under the Twitter panel in the Send tab.
For Twitter Users
If you use Twitter and want to send bookmarks to your Twitter feed, associate a Twitter account (only a single Twitter account can be associated at one time) by logging into Twitter under the Twitter panel. You have the option to send all your saved bookmarks to Twitter by selecting the “Tweet all bookmarks unless private” checkbox when you add the Twitter account. If you’ve selected this option, your Twitter account will appear by default in the Send field.
Add a Short Message
By short, we mean 116 characters or less. For messages sent to Twitter, Delicious will generate a shortened URL (which looks like this: icio.us/1293uf). See notes below about the shortened URL.
How Recipients Receive Your Shared Bookmarks
When you share a bookmark, the recipients will see the following:
Delicious User Recipients: When you share a bookmark with another Delicious user, the bookmark will continue to appear in the user’s Delicious Inbox with any message you might have added when you shared the bookmark.
Email Recipients: When you email a bookmark to share with a friend, your friend will receive a short email with the share URL in its full and original form, any message you might have added, and a link to your bookmarks.
Twitter: Your message and a shortened URL of the site you bookmarked will appear in your Twitter feed as you see below.
Some Notes about Delicious Shortened URLs
When you tweet a bookmark with Delicious, we shorten the URL to leave more space for your message. We’ve dusted off our old icio.us domain to make links shorter for this purpose. When a user clicks on an icio.us shortened URL in a tweet, they are directed to the bookmarked site without any framing. Delicious forwards search engines to the site you bookmarked by using the recommended “301 Permanently Moved” redirection code. Any search engines that find your tweeted URLs will properly credit the shared site.
We hope this helps you to share the things you discover on the Web more easily with friends, colleagues, and family.
Rocco Caputo | delicious.com/braino
Ariel Seidman | delicious.com/aseidman
Rocco Caputo · braino
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Last year’s Delicious redesign made Search infinitely snappier and more usable. And after a year of solid use, we’ve thought hard about how we wanted to see the service grow to accommodate user needs and our own wish-list of features. On Tuesday, we launched numerous improvements to Delicious and we are going to review in further detail the search enhancements:
Time Filters
Often, limiting the time-frame of a search can help narrow down your results on a time-sensitive subject. For example, a search for the term tour de france will bring up bookmarks about the race in general. By limiting these results to the last month, you will display more results related to the 2009 tour, and by limiting the results to just one day you’ll find the most up-to-date news in our system.
To use this feature, perform a search as you would normally. On the resulting page, open the panel beneath the search box (this may already be open) and choose one of the links listed in the right-hand panel, beneath the headline “Bookmarks saved From.”
Delicious Trends Graph
We added a graph to help you visually identify when bookmarks in your results were saved. For example, a search for Michael Jackson will show a large spike in the number of bookmarks saved in the last month or so, following his recent death. A search for The Police will show a large spike in 2006 due to the announcement of their reunion concert, and a subsequent fall off in saves.
Tag Filters
With some search queries bringing in thousands or even millions of results, it’s often difficult to dial-in exactly what you’re looking for using the search term alone. But since most bookmarks on Delicious are saved with tags, you can now filter your results by specifying only those bookmarks that have been saved with, or without, a specific tag. For example, let’s take a search term with a few different meanings: “jaguar”. You could be searching for information on the cat, car, NFL team, the Fender guitar, or the Apple operating system. To narrow your choices down to just the automobile, you can add a positive tag filter to show only those results saved with the tag “car.” This will reduce the number of results relating to the other synonyms. You could also add a negative tag filter like “NFL”, to show only those bookmarks saved without that tag.
To use the feature, perform a search as you would normally. On the resulting page, open the panel beneath the search box (this may already be open) and then click a tag filter once to limit the results to those bookmarks saved with that tag, or click it twice to limit the results to bookmarks saved without the tag. The icon beside the tag name will turn green or red to indicate which state the tag-filter is in. Double-clicking the name of a tag will allow you to edit it, allowing you to create a custom tag filter.
(Tip 2: you can also add a tag filter in the search query box itself. Typing “tag: car” will add a positive tag filter, and “-tag:nhl” will add a negative tag filter.)
Enhanced Search Results
Delicious has made Flickr thumbnails and audio files playable on bookmark lists for quite some time now, but the feature was conspicuously absent from search. We’ve now gone one step further and incorporated enhanced displays for bookmarks from even more sites: Wikipedia, You Tube, Yelp, Yahoo! Local and CitySearch using a Yahoo technology called SearchMonkey.
Search Suggestions
Due to the success of the search-suggestions on the Yahoo! Search engine, we’ve decided to bring that feature to Delicious search. It should allow you dial-in the focus of your query, and help get better results.
We hope these enhancements makes your Delicious search experience more efficient and delightful. Let us know if you have any feedback in the comments below.
Nathan Arnold | delicious.com/nathanyarnold
Chris Draycott | delicious.com/chris_draycott
Front End Engineering
Nathan Arnold · nathanyarnold
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