Delicious (the social bookmarking site formerly known as del.icio.us that calls itself “the tastiest bookmarks on the web” and was also the father of the strange domain name), launched its long awaited redesign yesterday to help move the site beyond its late ‘90s style.
Though the underlying functionality is still the same, the new look and feel is designed to make it faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more desirable.
Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.
Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.
Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.
I’m a big Delicious user (http://delicious.com/cory411), but since I use the Firefox plugin, I rarely if ever visit the site.
However, with looks like this, I just might have to give it a second chance.
The Blogosphere got in a tizzy recently after Google decided to change its favicon (the little icon in your address bar that’s unique to each site).
To address those that demanded answers from the big G, Google has written a post about the new favicon, and explained that “the reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices”.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the little G, and would have preferred that they stick with the big G, but apparently they’ve got some goals in mind, since they “tried in total more than 300 permutations”.
Apparently they wanted something distinctive and noticeable, as well as something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn’t date itself, and considering the amount of feedback they received from people who noticed the change, I think they succeeded.
Rest assured though, if you can’t stand the new favicon, let them know, because they “really value feedback form users and want to hear your ideas”.
The minds over at ReadWriteWeb seem to think that with the announcement of Exchange support and the iPhone SDK, Apple has set themselves up to become the dominating force in next gen computing, and I must say that I agree.
Here’s why:
The demand for small yet functional computers has already been demonstrated with the Asus Eee PC. If you can fit an entire computer into your pocket, you open up a world of possibilities.
The demand for pocket sized gaming devices has already been demonstrated with the DS (as well as all other pocket sized Nintendo consoles) and the PSP. Throw in Wii-esque motion controls and you’ve got yourself a winner.
Windows Mobile is terrible.
Exchange support means the iPhone can do what the BlackBerry does, only it looks good doing it, and can play games, movies, music, and more while you’re waiting.
It takes an iPod and a phone (two things many people carry around with them anyways) and combines them into one device. Why carry two when just one will suffice?
It’s an Apple product, so the UI is both beautiful and functional.
Combine a full SDK with a huge desire to develop for the latest and greatest mobile platform, and you’ll have throngs of developers jumping on board to develop amazing apps out of the gate. Microsoft Office anyone?
The list goes on and on.
Basically, as long as Apple can ride its current wave of iPhone success to conclusion, it will set the bar far beyond what anyone else is even striving towards at this point. The iPhone has created a whole new game, and currently, Apple is the only player.
Does this mean Apple will surely dominate next gen computing?
Time will tell, but all signs currently point to yes.
Google has finally released details about their phone plans, and despite rumors, it’s not going to be a Gphone.
Instead, Google announced the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, and specifically Android, “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.”
While it’s not an iPhone killer that most had hoped for, it does present some interesting opportunities for the mobile world, so stay tuned to see what they do with it.
