Delicious Relaunched

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Delicious was not really a very popular service to begin with, but it introduced several features that are now integral to social networking and bookmarking, particularly the concept of tagging. Now that Delicious is being relaunched, it will introduce “Stacks” as playlists for websites.

Delicious was one of those services that often worked in the background. Most users would install a bookmarklet on their browser toolbars for easily bookmarking just about any webpage. Delicious buttons caught on with some websites, but the service mostly functioned mostly for storing bookmarks across platforms rather than sharing.

After having acquired Delicious in 2005, Yahoo! didn’t do much with the service, save for integration with Yahoo! logins. News of Delicious being retired was leaked in late 2010, which prompted investors AVOS — comprised of YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen — to acquire the service this April.

Now Delicious is making a grand relaunch, and the first thing users will notice is a change in the interface. The branding and look and feel of the website is still the same, although one major thing has been added so far: Stacks. AVOS wants Delicious to feature playlists for websites, similar to how YouTube implemented video playlists for sharing. With Stacks, users can share sets of websites to contacts or to the public. It’s like socially-curated content, but in reverse. You give website recommendations for your friends to follow (as opposed to your reading recommendations based on friends’ reading lists.

The new Stacks interface is also graphically more appealing than the simple text-based interface that Delicious had. The new feature is designed to encourage users to share content with others. Delicious is now back in beta, and the back-end has likewise been overhauled. Delicious will still contain user data saved prior to the relaunch, assuming users have pre-approved moving their data to the new owners’ server, and the API will still work with third-party plugins and services that tap into its data.

Delicious is aiming to increase awareness of the service, with Stacks being at the front-line of sharing bookmarks with friends. With this new social content bookmarking and curation, will Delicious succeed at getting back to the limelight as a major social bookmarking service?