By now you’ve probably heard Yahoo relaunched delicious. The new design is intuitive and inviting without straying too far from the app’s original simplicity. Great effort. Long overdue.
That said, I’ve always preferred delicious to its competitors, even though they were a lot prettier.
Take ma.gnolia, for instance. Beautiful site. Great features. But, where the spartan design of delicious was open and hackable, ma.gnolia’s (stronger) design forces a very specific experience.
Log in to ma.gnolia, and you see your bookmarks, 10 at a time. Hit the popular bookmarks section, and you see 20 more. Don’t ask what makes these bookmarks popular. They just are.
At first pass, I was afraid the new delicious site was taking a similar direction. (If it wasn’t clear before, I think too much design instruction can be bad.) Here’s what keeps that from being the case:
Delicious uses hackable urls. So even though the new design interface kills out several features I really like, I can still get at these options right from the address bar.
As an example, the feature I use most frequently is the option to display recent bookmarks saved by 50 or 100 people. The new design only allows you to choose up to 25 in the select box. But all you need to do is change “/recent/?min=25″ to “/recent/?min=100″ in the query string and you get your old options back.
I have no idea why Yahoo took so long to beat the ugly out of delicious. I’m just glad they didn’t beat the good stuff out in the process.
