I really dislike the del.icio.us redesign. For me the beauty of that service (online bookmarking) was that it eschewed extraneous social features and had laser focus on letting you bookmark and tag stuff as quickly as possible.

The new set up fails on several counts:

First off, the design is bulkier, in order to foreground new functionality they’ve cluttered the previously rather severe but ultra functional interface. Mos tof the time I don’t visit the delicious site , i experience it through the post form and through RSS feeds by bulking up the post form this thin client type experience is lost it feels like I’m visiting a site rather than using a service.

The new javascript is so weighty that firefox struggles to keep up with even my sluggish typing as it looks up what tag I might be typing this turns the work of tagging and description from a 5 second rattle of the key board to a 30 second wait and see exercise with added time for typo fixing.

The first of these problems is a matter of taste, the second can be solved by faster computers and faster Javascript (roll on ECMA script 4 (yeah right)) etc. The main problem with the new design though is the way that the tags suggested are from the group pool rather than my own taxonomy this means that as I tag and Alan Moore interview I’m offered the following options : alan.moore, alan-moore, alan_moore, AlanMoore and finally my standard vocabulary alanmoore. Now a lot of the time this isn’t an issue I tend towards no caps and no punctuation tagging but then sometimes I forget or sometimes, more importantly, for speed sake I just choose the first thing on the list, so what’s going to happen is that I’ll end up with a real mixed bag of tags for Alan Moore and my querying of my bookmarks will be markedly less effective. I can see why they chose to do this, get everyone fixed on the same vocabulary and you have much more effective cross user browsing experience and you can do all sorts of neat stuff, but it diminishes del.icio.us’s value to me as a tool, moving the site away from being focussed on the individual user and towards a more blurry / generic social bookmarking site, towards Digg or whatever.

All that said, I’m totally aware that people always hate redesigns (though i like to think that having been on the receiving end of this hate a few times I have a more objective view than most) and maybe this one will grow on me, the reorganising of the “network” side of things works very well and is a big improvement and maybe with time I’ll learn to love everybody the consensus tagging schemes but i’m nto holding my breath.

Someone really needs to make a PHP MySQL del.icio.us clone (with an easy import util natch) with the ability to subscribe to del.icio.us and other social bookmarking services as well as so I can install that on sunny blue and be done with yahoo’s meddling ways for good, if they force me to get a yahoo account I will be really pissed off and probably have to do it myself.

[EDIT] just noticed the URL is now http://delicious.com/ rather than the awkwardly punctuated http://del.icio.us/ this is clearly a major improvement. Please mentally find and replace all on the times above that I laboriously typed out del.icio.us

[EDIT 2] Another positive feature i just discovered is that you can now do intersection searches, shame they don’t seem to have included union and compliment functionality but the ability to search for eg. “games” AND “flash” is something I’ve wanted for a long time.