In honor of the University from my home state, and to pioneer Gopher 2.0 revolution, Delicious is proud to support Gopher. Feel free to bookmark your favorite Gopher sites using Delicious. Here’s a few good ones to get you started.

I really like the Delicious inbox. I use it to share a myriad of bookmarks with my friends and family. Today, it just got better by providing a way to remove bookmarks from
your Inbox! If we’re going to take the Inbox metaphor to heart - you’ve got to be able to take things out of it.

Not only can you remove bookmarks, you can even use bulk edit in your Inbox to remove a lot of them at once.

One way to take advantage of this is to use your Inbox as a reading list. If your friend or colleague sends you a bookmark, keep it in your Inbox until you’ve had a
chance to read it. When you’re done reading it, you can remove it or, if it’s worthwhile, save it permanently to your own bookmarks.

Happy cleaning!

PS. Here is a list of other recent changes.

Illustration courtesy of Beck Tench.

Here are people’s top ten searches on Delicious for 2008, with some commentary:

1. news — Along with the usual faces such as BBC News and CNN, Delicious likes Slashdot, Digg, and a visualization called Newsmap.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. restaurants — Guides for New York, London, and everywhere. Sounds good to me.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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?
9. 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.
10. 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:

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!

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.

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:

• http://delicious.com/tag/system:filetype:mp3+jazz+free
• http://delicious.com/tag/system:media:audio+npr
• http://delicious.com/tag/system:media:audio+podcast

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!

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

We took some major steps forward this year, including launching the new Delicious, releasing our new Internet Explorer add-on, and making major updates to our Firefox add-on.

Thanks for your continued support, and thanks for using Delicious!

Infrastructure
The most important news is that our new platform has been stable and is meeting our performance goals. In the days of the old Delicious, we had to put a lot of effort into just keeping the lights on and struggling to keep up with growth. With our new infrastructure, these problems are largely gone and our pagers have never been so quiet. But more importantly the Delicious service is now faster and more reliable, which was a key goal of this project. In fact, I’m very happy to say that Delicious has experienced zero downtime since the day after launch. (Hopefully now that I’ve said that we won’t discover an unshielded thermal exhaust port somewhere…)

Some of you have reported seeing error messages indicating you’ve been “blocked” from accessing Delicious or that the service is unavailable. This is not due to Delicious being down (it isn’t); rather it appears the primary cause is a bug in older versions of our Delicious Bookmarks add-on for Firefox. If you use our Firefox add-on please make sure you have the very latest version from here. You can also make sure you’re up-to-date by clicking “Find Updates” under “Tools” → “Add-ons” in Firefox.

Browser add-ons
Speaking of add-ons, we recently launched our Internet Explorer add-on. It includes most of the features offered by our popular Firefox version and works with IE 6 and 7 (IE 8 beta 2 generally works as well, although it won’t be official until IE 8 is). The response has been great so far; thanks to all of you who have tried it out. Your comments on the forum have helped us track down a number of bugs that we addressed in a major update last week. There were also some issues with our Firefox add-on immediately following the launch of the new Delicious, and we recently released an update for that as well. So please make sure you’re running our latest versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Design
We had two major goals for the new design. The first was to address the user feedback we’ve received over the last few years regarding usability problems, consistency issues, and interface bugs. Our second goal was to make Delicious even easier to understand and thus to bring new users into the community. So far it seems to be working on both counts. The majority of the feedback has been positive (thanks!), and we’re also seeing a notable increase in new users and general traffic across Delicious.

That said, we know that not all of you are fans of the new design. There has been plenty of vocal and well-reasoned feedback on the discussion forum, and we’ve been reading every post and email and responding as much as possible. We’ve also been taking action. Since the initial launch we’ve made more than 30 changes to the new interface, nearly all of them in direct response to user feedback. We’ve also fixed a number of bugs you pointed out. You can read more about these changes here.

Moving forward we will continue listening to and taking action based on your comments, questions, bug reports, and suggestions. We want to ensure that Delicious remains the greatest social bookmarking tool, both for new users and for the people who already know and love it. We’re also working on new functionality that you’ve been asking for, and we look forward to sharing more about that soon.

If you haven’t already, please join the conversation on our forum and let us know what you think. Thanks for using Delicious!

The new Delicious is just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.  Here are the main 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. You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

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.  Check out the What’s New page for an overview of the changes, or watch this animation that sums it up nicely:

So why did we switch to delicious.com?  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.  Of course the old del.icio.us domain and all its URLs will continue to work.  Also note that the domain change requires a new login cookie, which is why everyone has to log in again.

It has taken us a while to get here, and we really appreciate all the patience and support you’ve shown us. Now that our new platform is in place we expect to release new features more quickly. Please check out the new site and then head over to our new discussion forum to let us know what you think and what you’d like to see next.  We’ll be listening.

We’ll also be posting to the blog soon to share some details about decisions we made and lessons we learned during the development and design process.

The Delicious Team

P.S. Comments are off on this post because we’d like you all to add your bug reports and feedback to the Delicious discussion forum (open to all registered Delicious users). This will be more organized and will allow us to respond to more comments.