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Social Bookmarking Rises Again With Delicious Remake

Social bookmarking websites have been declared dead, but could a makeover of Delicious make the tool more relevant?

Back in April, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen swooped in and saved social bookmarking service Delicious from being shuttered by Yahoo, purchasing it for an undisclosed sum. Was it worth saving, and is there room in today's social media landscape for a concept that seems historical rather than futuristic?


While still in use, sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon represent an older, more static way of using the Internet that doesn't take social interaction much into account. I checked out my Delicious account for purposes of this story, and realized that I haven't tagged, shared, or added anything since 2008.

Bookmarking Sites Thrive That Use Social Interaction Well


Slashdot, one of the first, has a devoted community that sticks with the site through thick and thin. In the cowboy days of search engine optimization (SEO), a decent mention on Slashdot meant that your website had been "Slashdotted", and a guaranteed bump in traffic in rankings soon followed. The community on Slashdot is tech-heavy and fact-driven.


Digg is a cautionary tale of what happens when social interaction on such a site doesn't go well. Digg works on the same basic premise as Reddit; if a story is voted up by users, its popularity surges on the site. In Digg, the process of voting a story down to dislike it was called "burying", and this and other factors were what led to the site's decline in popularity. Supergroups of users gamed Digg to vote perfectly good stories down and bad stories up, leading to a decline of quality that drove many users into the waiting arms of Reddit.

Are Twitter and Facebook Killing Social Bookmarking?




How the Delicious Revamp Will Be Different

That being said, there's a reason I haven't used Delicious since 2008. I'm not the type of person who saves things to read later, because for me "later" never arrives. I'm much more interested in the real-time offerings of Facebook and Twitter, and if I find a truly remarkable piece of information or product, I go old-school and bookmark it.


This makeover of the currently static site hopefully won't turn off its half-million users. You could argue that a Delicious user opted not to be a part of a news aggregator site like Digg, probably based on the simplicity and lack of advertising on Delicious.

The overhaul of Delicious will allow users to organize the links that they are constantly getting from social media, something you can do with current social bookmarking sites, but only by cutting and pasting links. Hurley and Chen's solution sounds much more interactive and easy than the current offerings.

What Should Your Business Do?

If you have a company blog, you've probably got AddThis or some other plug-in installed that allows users to share data through Facebook, Twitter, and social bookmarking sites. Beyond that, a business doesn't need to do much to take advantage of social bookmarking sites besides offer content worthy enough to be bookmarked.

The re-launch of Delicious will be something to watch for, thanks to the experiences of Hurley and Chen. We won't have to wait too long; the new site should be out before the end of 2011. In the meantime, if you are a Delicious user, make sure you log in and give it permission to transfer your bookmarks to the new site so that you don't lose them when the new site is brought online.


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