delicious redesign

July 31, 2008 —

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.

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YHOO

May 5, 2008 —

For those of you contemplating buying some Yahoo! after today’s “plunge,” consider this. Immediately prior to Microsoft’s bid to acquire, YHOO stock was lower than today’s price. In other words, it hasn’t plunged at all.

And, while they may have gained some degree of credibility for fighting off the big ugly fish, they’ve also ran off a lot of brilliant people in their scramble.

For what it’s worth, I’m glad Microsoft didn’t get their straw in my milkshake – I have a lot of data inside Y! properties. But I’m still not ready to believe the kick in the head was enough to get them making sense (ie, acting strategically).

We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, I still say get your money in gold. It doesn’t compete against Google.

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Y!: email is social

November 14, 2007 —

Yesterday, I wrote about Yahoo’s social network they have lying around in parts. Looks like my timing was off as now the Internet is talking about Yahoo’s vision of a new social network, Inbox 2.0. In an effort to keep up with the meme, I’ll just link to the NYT post and drop in an excerpt.

Yahoo, of course, has had many different takes on this over the years: its member directory, Geocities, Yahoo 360. It recently started Yahoo Mash. But none of these is quite right, Mr. Garlinghouse said. Mash is simply an experiment, not a product being readied for mass promotion.

Glad we can all participate in their experiments.

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