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Delicious, the once-popular social bookmarking site, is about to go through yet another redesign to improve the service's functionality.
Chad Hurley, one of YouTube's co-founders who purchased Delicious from Yahoo through his company AVOS, told Mashable that the goal is to roll out a new beta version of Delicious "over the next month," which he describes as "more streamlined and easier to use." In particular, AVOS is focusing on improving the basics, including making it easier for Delicious users to save links, tag posts and search on the site.
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After AVOS acquired Delicious in March, 2011, it tried to tweak how the community shared and discovered content. Last September, Delicious introduced a big new feature called Stacks, which gave users a way to share a group of links. Several months later, Delicious tried to make Stacks more social by giving users the option to collaborate on building them, but even then the new feature didn't take off like the company had hoped. Over the summer, Delicious announced it was killing off Stacks and reverting back to the traditional tagging system for Delicious.
Hurley and his partner at AVOS, YouTube co-founder Steven Chen, originally wanted to re-think the way people use Delicious and introduce the service to a whole new audience. But, as Hurley admits, their efforts to remake Delicious were hindered at first by two factors: the website's old code base and the fact that they had a skeleton crew of less than five people working on the project. On top of this, Hurley notes that the Delicious community was unaccustomed to big changes, which made it "a little painful" when the team did finally introduce features like Stacks.
"We wanted to reposition Delicious to a new set of users and hopefully jump start growth," Hurley said. "As we've learned throughout this experience, it's hard to just introduce that stuff right off the bat with an existing community."
Instead, Hurley says he and his team eventually decided to take some of their big ideas for Delicious and apply them to a new project called Zeen, which is also a content curation tool, but one that essentially lets users create their own online magazines. Unlike Delicious, Zeen didn't have an existing user base, so AVOS had more flexibility to introduce new ideas there. Zeen launched in beta at the end of July.
In the meantime, AVOS has staffed up and currently has about 50 people working on Delicious, Zeen and "two or three" other projects in the pipeline. With those extra resources, Hurley and his team are now ready to take another crack at improving Delicious, but this time, he says, "We're focusing a bit more on the utility side." In addition to working on improvements to the website's basic tools, Hurley hopes to play up search on the site a bit more -- though tagging will continue to be the main action for users.
Hurley says AVOS is also hoping to release a "series of new things" related to Delicious, including a Delicious iPhone app. It remains to be seen if these updates will be enough to start growing the Delicious user base again.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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