Archive for December, 2008
I talk to a lot of people who use Delicious — on the forum, by email, on Twitter, and more — so I have a sense of what individuals think about the service, but I thought it’d be fun to check out what large numbers of people do on Delicious when they’re not asking for new features, reporting bugs, or praising the arrival of bulk edit. Let’s see!
Here are people’s top ten searches on Delicious for 2008, with some commentary:
- news — Along with the usual faces such as BBC News and CNN, Delicious likes Slashdot, Digg, and a visualization called Newsmap.
- blogs — These results contain a variety of lists and tools for people who want to find more to read or want to write their own blogs, including The Hype Machine and Edublogs.
- reference — People find Delicious useful as a practical source of knowledge, hooray. Delicious users betray their nerdiness by providing specialized resources for programming and web design for many of these results.
- wiki — Several of these results are for wiki software (which makes sense, since deciding on a software package might be the hardest thing about starting a wiki), but one of them is Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, which looks like a handy reference.
- restaurants — Guides for New York, London, and everywhere. Sounds good to me.
- hotels — Most of these results are useful for cost-effective comparison, but a lot of Delicious people have also bookmarked Unusual Hotels of the World, Design Hotels, and Unique Hotels for Global Nomads.
- css — Delicious’ slight geeky bias means that searching for a technical topic gets you the best tutorials, documentation, and tips. And luckily, people searching for CSS probably aren’t looking for anything else.
- web 2.0 — What do people want when they search for this? I’m not sure, but they can find all kinds of things, from a how-to design style guide to The Machine is Us/ing Us. See also our 2005 blog post that attempts to answer what is web 2.0?
- artists — Delicious’ taste ranges across places to find out about artists (the-artists.org), places to buy and sell work (Etsy), and places where you can find drawings by my friends (deviantART), along with blogs and artists’ organizations.
- music — I figure people are looking for new music here, and they can find a lot of it, from Pandora to Last.fm and Musicovery, and if their searches lead to bookmarked mp3s, they can use the built-in Delicious media player to listen right away.
These may seem like normal informational searches, but the results are useful because those sites have all been judged good by many thousands of people like you and me (out of the millions who use Delicious). A little more character comes out in the list of the next ten top searches: facebook, games, photoshop, iphone, photography, nightlife, diy, apple, science, and firefox.
If you use the Delicious Firefox addon, you can switch your top-right search box to Delicious and search like this all the time:
December 18th, 2008
Tag the season… in bulk!
As some of you have noticed, we rolled out bulk edit last week. By now everyone should be able to see a link to “Bulk edit (beta)” on your bookmarks page.
Bulk edit lets you share, unshare, tag and untag multiple bookmarks at a time.
My family asks me every year what I want for the holidays. I look at my wishlist tag and I realize maybe a Tony Stark Iron Man-like robotic suit or a $37,000 exotic hypoallergenic leopard-like kitty might not be in their budget. Now I’ve got the ability to very quickly adjust my wishlist.
But the spirit of tagging isn’t just for wishlists, now you can also:
- Share bookmarks you imported as private
- Mark private those NSFW bookmarks before you share your delicious page with mixed company
- Refine your tags for maximum awesomeness.
You’ve been asking for this feature so let us know what you think.
Happy Tagging!
December 16th, 2008
We’ve just launched a mobile version of Delicious. You can find it at http://m.delicious.com. This is a beta and represents our first real dabbling in mobile browsing, so we’ve started conservatively. The site is designed to work on as many devices as possible, although YMMV.
Delicious Mobile enables you to sign into your account and browse your bookmarks, tags, inbox, and other data. You can also browse popular and recent bookmarks and tags from the Delicious community. This means you can:
- Ditch your phone’s bookmarks — they’re too hard to keep updated, organized, and synchronized. Just use your Delicious bookmarks instead!
- Tag-stalk on the go — use your Network to follow what your friends are reading, no matter where you are.
- Break the tedium — browse the tastiest bookmarks on the Web next time you’re standing in line to buy the new Guns N’ Roses (wait, people still buy CDs?).
Next up on our to-do list is to integrate our social search engine into the mobile site. We welcome your feedback on what you’d like to see in the future, so let us know what you think.
December 9th, 2008
Among the hundreds of millions of bookmarks saved on Delicious are a large number of audio files, collected from across the Web. Rock, jazz, house, spoken word — you name it, you can probably find a link to it somewhere on Delicious. For some time now we’ve supported the streaming of MP3 audio via our “PlayTagger” feature, which is integrated directly into Delicious and also available for adding to your own site.
We are now extending this capability by integrating FoxyPlayer from our friends over at Yahoo! Music. FoxyPlayer is a slick embedded audio player that supports a wider variety of audio formats and interoperates with the popular FoxyTunes add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer. But perhaps most interestingly for Delicious users, it also turns your audio bookmarks into playlists you can control from your browser. To see it in action, check out some examples:
By using the “system:media:audio” tag, you can filter most views on Delicious to look for playable audio files. You can even try this on your Network page to see what your friends and contacts have been listening to.
You can read more over at the Yahoo! Music Blog. Give FoxyPlayer a try and let us know what you think!
December 6th, 2008
New updates for the Delicious Bookmarks Internet Explorer and Firefox add-ons have been released. Our add-ons engineering team has been hard at work implementing new features and fixing bugs informed by your bug reports and feature requests. Many thanks go out to those users on our Forums who provided lots of feedback after downloading the beta versions of the extensions.
The Firefox add-on has received a major behind-the-scenes change as we moved from using RDF to SQLite for storing the bookmarks. This means that the add-on is faster and more stable, especially for users with large accounts. It has been updated to work with Firefox 3.1 Beta and now works on Firefox 2.0-3.1b1 on Windows, Mac, and most Linux distributions that support Firefox.
The Internet Explorer add-on has been updated to resolve some login issues that resulted in bookmarks not syncing properly and other login related weirdness. It currently works on Windows XP and Vista with IE 6, 7, and 8 (though while IE 8 is still in beta there may be some issues).
Both of the add-ons have had a new feature added that allows you to change or disable the keyboard shortcuts. This means no more conflicting keyboard shortcuts or difficulties trying to change the shortcuts if you don’t want them. Updates have also been made to improve the search, favorite tags, and sorting features.
We love getting feedback about the add-ons and have some cool new features planned for development over the next year, so join in on the conversation in our forums.
Jared Elson
Product Manager, Delicious
December 5th, 2008
