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.

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.

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.

That said, I’m at Flickr every day. And upcoming. And del.icio.us. And MyBlogLog. And if Y! could pull off a Twitter acquisition, they’d have all the components for a fundamentally improved social experience (and the perfect mouse trap for my online attention).

Presence. Check.

That’s right, I included MyBlogLog in a short list of apps that I hit on a daily basis. I won’t try to change your mind on the service itself, but if ever there was an app that almost implemented the foundation for the perfect social network, it’s MBL.

MyBlogLog decentralizes presence. There is no log in wall, no data lockdown, no single destination. Just a networked profile and a footprint that surfaces on participating services. It’s a simple idea. But it’s fundamentally better than the opposite approach of old networks like facebook.

So, assuming MBL & Y! realized their full potential, you’d no longer have to play constant gardener to profiles scattered across the internets.

Content. Check.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t produce content inside closed networks. My blog posts, Flickr streams, Tweets, bookmarks, etc, are all available for re-syndication. So, hypothetically, I could roll all my content into a single-point stream of consciousness and call it my online me.

But I prefer the idea of leaving it in the field. My Tweets have more context with friends than without. My Flickr photos are organized in sets, collections, and groups. My bookmarks are tagged. My events list other attendees. My posts have comments. (Sometimes.)

In other words, content has more meaning in its native habitat. (Much of that habitat being Y! properties.) And as much as I dig Jaiku, I think a lifestream could be a lot more than a blended river of xml.

Connections. Check.

Far be it from me to criticize anything that Microsoft values at greater than $15B, but my issue with facebook is that I have to be a registered facebook user and facebook friend of another facebook user to interact with them inside facebook. What if we’re already Twitter pals? Facebook doesn’t care.

Yahoo! could care. With very little effort. It could see that I’ve friended / followed a member of one of its niche communities and extend that connection throughout its properties. It could show me streams from friends specific to events I’m attending. It could let me know when friends are in my vicinity. It could do more. And with MBL, they could extend this even further.

Yahoo! remains a player. I wonder if they’re aware.