There's a new-found love for real time on the Internet and in social media in particular. It may be a necessity or it may be an “everybody else is doing it” move but more and more services and sites are integrating real-time features, some useful some gimmicky. Yahoo's social bookmarking site Delcious is also jumping on the bandwagon with a freshened-up homepage and a focus on – what else – Twitter.

Previously, the homepage featured the most popular links in a certain time frame but, much like Digg, these links took a while to get there, slowly building up momentum as more and more users bookmarked them. This, while ideal for “authoritative resources,” didn't do much for news links as, by the time they would become popular, their relevance had mostly dwindled, which is why most of the time the “Popular” tab would feature links from the first category. The new design addresses both problems, with a new “Fresh” tab that focuses mainly on links from the technology, web, politics, and media categories, while also using Twitter and recent bookmarks to bring out the most popular.

“Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, “eats our own dogfood” by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs (as ~81% of tweets do not contain URLs). Try clicking the ‘x Related Tweets’ link for any given story to see the Twitter conversation appear instantly inline,” Vik Singh, software architect at Yahoo, wrote on the Delicious blog.

Along with the new Fresh tab, work has been carried out in other areas, with a new integrated search feature and several advanced options to aid those with hundreds or more saved bookmarks. The new search has a timeline feature to narrow the search to a certain time frame and also allows users to filter the results using tags. Search results with rich media links can now be played inside the page, including those from YouTube, Flickr or Yelp local data.

All of the new features do a great job at integrating real-time content and Twitter with the service but it may be too little too late and it may also go against the type of service Delcious has been so far, mostly used to save bookmarks not to share content. There are better services for sharing links and there may be better services aggregating Twitter content so it's not clear whether these new changes will translate into more users.