Yes, it’s kind of hard to believe, but we’ve been chugging along for five years now.  In that time a huge number of people have made Delicious a part of their online lives.  We’re now up to 5.3 million users.  And with over 180 million unique URLs saved, together we have built a community resource that just keeps getting more interesting and more useful.

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!

Delicious!

Over the past few days we’ve been transitioning Delicious over to our new platform, quietly starting with RSS feeds and APIs. Today we’re taking the final step and flipping the switch on the new web site: delicious.com.

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:

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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.

After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven. When we release it, you’ll be automatically logged out of your account and will have to log in again, due to some changes we’re making behind the scenes.

That means now is a good time to make sure you know your username and password. Your username is what you see in the address bar when you visit your bookmarks (http://del.icio.us/your_username, soon to become http://delicious.com/your_username). And what’s your password? If you don’t remember, you can use our password reset tool to get a reset link delivered to the email address associated with your account.

But wait, is that email address correct and valid? You can check by visiting “change email” in your account settings when you’re logged in. Be sure to keep this address up to date. If the day comes when you’re logged out, you’ve forgotten your password, and the email address associated with your account is inaccessible or mistyped, we won’t be able to help you recover the password. So check it!

While we’re on the subject, remember that nobody from Delicious will ever ask you for your password. Also, don’t give your password to third-party sites that you don’t trust.

As we move toward launch day, we’ll keep you updated. Thanks for your patience and support, everyone.

For those of you who use Internet Explorer with del.icio.us, we’re announcing today the official release of the Delicious Bookmarks Add-on for Internet Explorer. In a nutshell, this extension brings you many of the best features of the Delicious Bookmarks Extension for Firefox while introducing a few new features of its own.

This extension works with XP and Vista for IE6 and IE7. IE8 should also work, but IE8 support is still in beta, since that browser isn’t final. Please go to our delicious-ie-extension group for comments and feedback regarding IE8.

Enjoy!

For more details on the IE extension, check out our original beta announcement. For the eager and impatient, download from our website.

Nick Nguyen
Senior Product Manager, del.icio.us

A little over a month ago, we announced our beta for Firefox 3 and encouraged you to try it out. After hundreds of thousands of downloads, you gave us some great feedback on how we could make it better and more stable. We’ve incorporated many fixes and refinements into the final release, and we’ve got a plan to release more features on a regular basis. Thanks again to everyone who participated in our beta; we really couldn’t have gotten here without you.

For a complete list of new features, check out our blog post announcing the beta; it covers all the basics.

For those of you who haven’t used our Firefox extension, it’s a great way to search and manage your bookmarks as well as keep track of your Delicious network and links for you. And if you’re still using Firefox 2, the new extension works perfectly with that browser as well. If you already use our existing extension, you’ll get a reminder to upgrade when you start Firefox. If you’re new to the extension, check it out on Mozilla’s add-on page.

Nick Nguyen
Senior Product Manager, del.icio.us

Amit Papnai
Principal Engineer, del.icio.us Extension Team

Sibil Mohammed
Senior Software Engineer (Firefox Extension)

Vivekanand Bolajwar
Senior Web Developer (Firefox Extension)

Sanjay Kumar
del.icio.us Extension Team QA

Today, I’m happy to announce an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version of our del.icio.us bookmarks extension. For the first time our Internet Explorer users will enjoy most of the best features of our Firefox extension. We’re very excited about this release, as we have many users who use Internet Explorer as their primary browser. Since there are some differences between Internet Explorer and Firefox, the two versions are not exactly the same, but you’ll find many of the same great features like the del.icio.us Sidebar and Toolbar. Here’s an overview of the IE features.

• Near instantaneous searching with very large accounts (over 10K bookmarks)
• Full del.icio.us sidebar and toolbar implementation with bookmark sync and typedown search
• Toolbar indicators for new network activity and links for you
• Works on IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta on both XP and Vista

Interested? Download it here.

Since this release is so new, we’ve also created a Yahoo! Group for downloading and discussing the Internet Explorer release. Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/delicious-ie-extension to sign up. In the group we’ll gather your feedback and share the release notes for each version. We’ve been using it every day in the del.icio.us tagmines for a few months now, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve found all the bugs. Just like the Firefox 3 release, many of the features and interface choices are experimental and may change before we officially launch. As always, we’re eager to hear your feedback on the add-on.

In other news, we’re all humbled by the large and positive reaction to our Firefox 3 beta extension release announcement a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to everyone who tried our extension out, especially those who submitted bugs. This feedback is enormously helpful as we work towards a final release of that extension.

Nick Nguyen
Senior Product Manager, del.icio.us

Firefox 3 users, rejoice! Today I’m pleased to announce a beta release of an enhanced version of our Firefox Add-on for del.icio.us that now has full Firefox 3 support while retaining Firefox 2 compatibility. While it is largely similar to the release version of our Firefox Add-on, there are a few nifty new features:

• Jump to Tag feature (press F2) allows you to quickly access tags and
  bookmarks using the keyboard
• New layout for saving bookmarks
• Preferences now in a separate dialog under Tools (which also can be
  invoked via the prefs button on the FF Add-ons pane)
• Status bar indicators for network activity, new links for you, and the del.icio.us website
• Classic mode for users who just want simple buttons without the overhead of sync

Like any beta release this Firefox Add-on is meant to provide you with a preview of upcoming features. Some of the features and interface choices are experimental and may change before we officially launch and we’re eager to hear your feedback on the changes, especially if you think we can do certain things better. If you have issues or comments, please let us know in the delicious-firefox-extension Yahoo! Group.

Download it here. Also, since this is prerelease software, please do not submit support requests via the normal channel- we have a Yahoo! Group for discussion of the Firefox 3 Add-on.

Thanks for helping us test- we’ve built and upgraded these Add-ons based on lots of user feedback and we hope you enjoy trying them out.

Nick Nguyen
Senior Product Manager, del.icio.us

We’ve just launched our own official del.icio.us application for Facebook. It’s super easy to use; just visit our setup page, and after a few clicks you’ll be able add del.icio.us to your Facebook Profile page. The application lets you post a summary of your bookmarking activity to your Mini-Feed. It can also be configured to show your latest bookmarks so your friends can easily see what you’ve been reading.

Give it a shot and let us know what you think. We’re also working on additional functionality, so let us know what you’d like to see in future versions!

Nick Gerakines
Delicious Engineer

Adobe Illustrator is one of my favorite design tools, and as part of the redesign of del.icio.us I’ve been using it in a number of interesting ways. For example, I’ve written JavaScript code to pull in and parse del.icio.us RSS feeds then automatically render my latest designs in Illustrator using real data. This allows us to rapidly iterate on the design well before anyone has to write any real code.

So I was very interested when the Adobe Illustrator team came to visit us a few months ago. It turns out that Illustrator users are constantly making excellent online descriptions of their tips, techniques, and tutorials, and Adobe wanted a good way to collect and share these with other users online and within Illustrator. So why not use del.icio.us?

Adobe’s first step was to set up a del.icio.us account and start collecting the best bookmarks on Illustrator they could find. They then integrated del.icio.us into Illustrator CS3 as part of their “knowhow” palette, thereby allowing users to tap directly into Adobe’s bookmarks.

To try it out within Illustrator CS3, select the “Window” menu then “Adobe Labs” > “knowhow”. From the “knowhow” panel you can see contextual help for the tool you are using and search the Internet for more help. You will then notice that one of the tabs has the del.icio.us logo on it, which points you to the bookmarks Adobe has collected. Alternatively, if you don’t have CS3, you can also try out the “knowhow” palette on Adobe Labs or http://knowhow.adobe.com or of course you can always see all their bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/knowhow.

If you have found or have created any Web pages that you think other Illustrator users would find useful, simply tag them “for:knowhow” and the Adobe team will review and add them to their collection for all Illustrator users to enjoy.

Over the past year or two, I’ve been delighted to notice educators and librarians embracing Delicious both as a way to share bookmarks with each other and a way to help their students and patrons learn. This makes perfect sense to me as a college student because I bookmark and tag references for all my projects and I’d love to see similar collections from my professors and classmates.

I don’t know who first realized the potential of Delicious for education, but I’ve seen a huge amount of community documentation created by teachers and librarians to help each other understand what this place is, why it’s valuable, and how to use it. Here are some of my favorite bookmarks:

• Top 100 Tools for Learning — according to lists contributed by learning professionals, Delicious ranks first. Last year we were second only to Firefox.
• Library Journal explains why Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us.
• 7 things you should know about Social Bookmarking (PDF) is a primer from a university perspective, written by EDUCAUSE.
• How Delicious is changing academic research: a PhD student says “Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence as an academic these days. It’s where I make my friends, how I get the news, and where I go to trade.”
• A PBS Teachers blog takes “a look at the wonderful world of del.icio.us”.
• A collection of links to libraries that use Delicious, including many university libraries, with additional links to resources and tools.
• All about social bookmarking tools on the Teaching Hacks wiki.
• Social bookmarking on the Classroom 2.0 wiki. A couple of us (Stephen Hood and Chris Kim) spoke about Delicious at the Classroom 2.0 conference in San Francisco a few weeks ago.
• Networking with Del.icio.us — a short screencast by an instructional technology specialist which explains “your network” and “links for you”.

Bonus bookmark: a profile of Joshua as the MIT Technology Review’s Young Innovator of 2006, including part of the story of Delicious’ origins.

Fresh news from deep within Tag Mountain: we just launched an early, limited Preview of the Delicious redesign we’ve been working on for the past few months. We’ve refreshed the UI, built an entirely new (and faster) search engine, and added numerous improvements based on your feedback. The goal of this Preview is to get feedback from our users about the design changes and also start to put our new platform through the paces.

The initial invite list is already full, but we will likely be adding more openings in the near future. Check your links for you to see if you’re in the first round (sorry to be so indirect about it, but our privacy policy doesn’t allow us to email users about this sort of thing and we take that very seriously). If you don’t see the invite link but are interested in taking a look and giving us some feedback, you can add your username to the list.

We’ll be posting updates to this blog throughout the Preview process to keep everyone informed of what we’re learning. Thanks for your feedback and support!

Our friends over at Six Apart write:

If you have a TypePad blog, you can now make it easy for your readers to bookmark your stories on del.icio.us by automatically including a “save to del.icio.us” link in your post footers — without having to learn a single line of template code. Just sign into your account, navigate to your blog’s design tab, choose “Select Content” and configure your post footer.

In the past, we had a lot of questions from TypePad bloggers about how they could do this themselves, and instead of having them convert to Advanced Templates and copy and paste template code into their blogs, we wanted to save them the hassle and just do it as an option in the application.

If you’re using TypePad’s advanced template feature (and you know who you are), not to fear — del.icio.us has lots of options for adding your own savebuttons to your posts. Hint: you can use the template code that del.icio.us has for Movable Type, it will work just fine in your TypePad blog.

Michael Sippey
Six Apart

Greetings all and Happy New Year! (is it too late to say that now?) We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious. We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.

In the meantime, given this is the week of Macworld we thought you’d be interested in this Quick Tip on how to use Delicious on your iPhone.

Huge thanks to Tom Merritt at CNET who created this video and let us post it here. We hope this is a useful tool for all of you current and future iPhone users!
 
Chris Kim
Marketing Manager