One of the most popular bookmarking sites on the web is getting a new name and a new makeover. The company changed their name from "del.icio.us" to "delicious" and with that, a spiffy new site design to feast your eyes on. It's been an interesting ride since 2003, but it is now time to see if delicious is tuning up or breaking down with these latest changes.

Overview

Delicious is a social bookmarking site. It was one of the first of its kind. Not only that, it is the most popular social bookmarking site today. Many people enjoy this service because they no longer have to worry about ever losing their bookmarks again. I should know because I once lost all my bookmarks due to a hard drive failure, and I was not happy about that.

Interface

The new design of delicious's interface is much more clean and intuitive when compared to the previous design. I doubt it will attract new users because of the changes, but current users will certainly welcome the improvements. Being able to quickly access your tag bundles, and minimizing information you don't need is all time saving additions.

Saving time is pretty much the focus of the new site design entirely. More information is displayed on fewer pages, and more things can be accomplished on the same page. I believe these additions were worthy adds in the end. Not much is different to the interface.

Functionality

The site brings a few new features in the way of functionality. For starters, there is the ability to search tags for all people, not only your own bookmarks. When you decide to perform a search, delicious will display any relevant information from your own bookmarks, and then will display saved bookmarks from other users.

Unfortunately, there were not any noticeable efforts to improve interaction amongst the delicious community. You would possibly expect that there would be ways of communication, or possibly a system to rate bookmarks, to make suggestions to other users. None of these features are found. This is an area that could have really been explored and made delicious a better product, but Yahoo does not seem to want to go this way.

Verdict

If you currently use delicious, then these upgrades are certainly helpful, and will be enjoyed by most. Considering the hype over the new site design, I was actually quite disappointed with the fact there is very little to no new functionality made into the new site redesign. It is a nice improvement, but it leaves much to be desired.

I for one think that delicious is not the money making machine that Yahoo envisioned when they purchased it. There has been no attempt to generate revenue from advertising, and unless people are paying to be displayed on the front page of delicious, I don't see how it will ever make money unless advertising is introduced into the site. I would have thought that Yahoo would at least try to implement some of the Yahoo services into the new site redesign, but so far from what I have seen, this is not the case.

Delicious is a great site, and I do use it exclusively as my bookmark manager, but beyond a web interface for bookmarking (which could easily be accomplished by another service if one decides to step-up to the challenge), it just doesn't appear to be that site you will be on for hours on end. It further solidifies the questioning of how will all these internet applications support themselves if they can not generate revenue. Yahoo and the delicious team still has much work to do.