14 DAY TRIAL // The revamped Delicious, at least the first version of it, is here. After getting bought from Yahoo by AVOS, a startup created by two YouTube cofounders, the site has been rebuilt from the ground up.
It will still feel familiar and many of the old concepts are still there, but the interface and the infrastructure have been rewritten and part of how it works has changed.
The changes are for the better, the site's new owners believe, and they represent the first step towards the re-imagined Delicious. For now, the new site is live and ready for users, new and old.
"We have some great news – the new Delicious site is now live," Delicious announced.
"We’re proud of what we built, but the process has also brought the site 'back to beta' as a work in progress," it said.
"Much more work will be needed to realize our vision: keeping the essence of Delicious – the premier social bookmarking tool – while building upon its core functionality to create a great discovery service, too," it added.
When you first visit the site, you'll notice a much more visual interface. The homepage is dominated by link collections, tiled next to each other and represented by a thumbnail image each.
These collections are now called stacks and it's how Delicious hopes you'll share links with your friends and the world from now on, "playlists for the web," as Delicious dubs them.
"Here’s how they work. Select some related links, plug them into a stack and watch the magic happen. You can customize your stack by choosing images to feature, and by adding a title, description and comment for each link," Delicious explained.
Stacks are dynamic, you can subscribe (follow) to one to find it more easily but also to keep up with updates, new links that get added to it.
There are plenty of other changes, but the core idea is simple, Delicious wants to make it easier to discover good stuff. It's something that most web services struggle to do, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on, yet something that no one has nailed perfectly yet.