When I saw the news about the launch of Delicious 2.0, I can’t say I felt a huge wave of joy, despite the fact that I am what most people would probably consider a hard-core Delicious user, with about 10,000 webpages saved since I started using it. But not only didn’t I feel any joy at the news, I didn’t really feel anything at all. In part, that could be because the new Delicious interface has been rumoured to be coming any day now for about a year (or perhaps even more, I’ve lost track). Now that it has arrived, it’s definitely anti-climactic at best. It also seems a lot slower than the old one, even though it is supposed to be faster. Maybe 10,000 bookmarks is just too many for it to handle.
But that’s not the only reason I’m ambivalent about the launch. Adam Ostrow put his finger on it in a Twitter message, in which he said that he never bookmarks things any more — he either remembers something, or searches for it, or asks someone else if he can’t remember the details. It has occurred to me over the past year or so that while I religiously bookmark things, often dozens of them in a single day, I rarely go back and look them up. If I’m writing about something and I remember some details, I type them into Google and eventually track the page down.
I’ve been experimenting with using Google Reader’s shared items as a kind of Delicious bookmark substitute, in part because that is hooked into social networks I use like FriendFeed.com and Feedly and Readburner and so on (although Delicious can be plugged into FriendFeed as well). But I have the same ambivalence about sharing items through Google Reader as well — I mean, I do it, but I hardly ever go back and look at them. Sometimes I do when I’m stuck for something to blog about, but that rarely happens. It’s occurred to me, however, that the simple act of bookmarking them makes it easier for me to remember them, the same way that setting my alarm ensures that I wake up before the alarm goes off, but if I don’t set it then I sleep in.
Perhaps the Delicious redesign will appeal to enough people who aren’t like me — to new adopters who are still using their Netscape or IE bookmarks, or to people using Diigo or Clipmarks or one of the dozens of other bookmarking tools (all of which I have also tried). But I think I’m even less likely to use Delicious than I was before. John Furrier also seems underwhelmed, although there are plenty of fans of the new site.
