InformationDynamics

Got mad web engineer skills? Comfortable with HTML5, CSS3 & PHP? Built any mobile apps? Want to work at Yahoo! and lead the global social bookmarking battle? You might be the perfect fit for the Delicious engineering team.

As you know, Delicious continues to lead the way in Social Bookmarking. And with some exciting new features and opportunities coming soon, we need a new teammate to join the crew and help create new experiences for our users. We’re a small team that still iterates like a start-up – we just happen to do it within a big company. This gives the Delicious team a tight family vibe but access and support from a leading global internet company.

If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, jump on careers.yahoo.com, search for ‘foosball’ (don’t ask) and look for Req# 32524.

Psst! If that sounds like too much effort, feel free to click here instead… ;)

Hi, everyone:

We admit it has been a while since our last Delicious product release, and here’s why:

1. We’ve been doing some housework and cleared up over 200 issues reported by you and our engineers.
2. We’ve spent the last few months making sure that if we suffer a major technical outage, we can rely on a fully operational copy of the site so you’re impacted for as little time as possible.
3. There were a few UI changes we needed to make before a larger release launches in a couple of months.

Most of these changes might not be obvious, but you’re bound to notice better-looking buttons, which are the first in a series of improvements we’ll be making to the interface.

We’ve also removed the SHARE link for private bookmarks. Though you can change the privacy setting by clicking EDIT or the Lock icon to the left of the link.

Another change to note is that Tags on the site will be basic rectangles instead of chevrons. We hope this will remove some points of confusion, reduce the code slightly, and limit how much the display fractures, when you increase the browser text size.

As you can see, we’ve been active listeners and tried to incorporate your continuous feedback in making the above changes.

Enjoy!

Greetings, Delicious community:

My name is Layla, and I am the new community manager for Delicious, Groups, and Answers. I came to Yahoo! after taking a one-year maternity leave. I had been enjoying motherhood so much that I figured I would go back to work only if a great opportunity knocked, and then I got offered my absolute dream job. I have been using Answers since its launch in 2005 and I belong to several mom-related Yahoo! Groups, so when I saw the position for a lead community manager for Answers, Groups, and Delicious, my first reaction was ‘Yahooooooooooo’, and my second reaction was, ‘Delicious’? Who actually uses social bookmarking sites now that we can just tweet everything and share links with our friends on Facebook?” The answer I got from those surrounding me was: “Total geeks, college professors, and librarians.”

Fortunately, the Delicious team gave me a chance, despite my lack of experience as a geek or librarian. I started by looking at the forums and was lost in the midst of technical conversations, embarrassed by my inability to get the gist of it all. I visited the blog, only to be faced with more technical knowledge, and spent time on the help pages trying to figure out how to use this product to my fullest advantage.

Embracing three properties all at once was quite overwhelming. I was bombarded with internal sites I needed to bookmark and articles I needed to read. The last thing I had time for was learning how to do social bookmarking on Delicious while I was struggling to figure out how to best organize my own bookmarks on my screen  — until a delicious moment hit me.

From the conversations I have seen on the forums, I think most of you know how to save a bookmark on Delicious, how to add the Delicious Add-on to Firefox or Internet Explorer, how to create tags for your bookmarks, etc. (Drop me a line if you don’t and I’ll walk you through it.) But I wonder how many of you actually know that there’s a beautiful way of organizing your bookmarks on your Firefox and Internet Explorer toolbars?

Once you have organized your bookmarks under the correct tags — for instance, if you created a “toread” tag and tagged the articles you want to read under, you can then:

1. Click the Delicious button on the left
2. Click Manage favorite tags



3. Add the tag you like (for instance, “To Read”).
4. Click OK

And voilà, your organized favorite tags will appear at the top of your toolbar.

You can continue to build new tags on your toolbar as you see fit, and also delete them anytime you don’t want to clutter your toolbar. I know this discovery has definitely saved me a lot of time at work— it is so much easier to find my needed bookmarks, and I wanted to be sure you benefited from this feature, too.

Would you like to share your Delicious moments with us? Send them to me and I’ll feature them in our next blog.

We’ve got our fingers in a number of pies right now, so the update we’ve just rolled out is mostly limited to some minor UI fixes while we start work on larger projects. The majority of these minor changes you probably won’t notice, however the changes to the BrowserBar you probably will. We’ve added a simple ‘SAVE’ button and supplied a drop down menu so that you can skip forward, backward or avoid the pages you know employ frame busting (WSJ, Twitter etc).

We’ve also added a keyboard shortcut so that you can progress through the bookmarks by using the right and left cursor keys. Perfect for those moments when pushing a mouse pointer around the screen is just toooo much effort.

Enjoy!

Those of you that have been with us for a while know that we’ve been trying to separate the old recipient type ‘for:’ tags from standard meta data related to the link. We’ve gone through some iterations of how this works and we’ve just made another tweak that will make life a little easier for all.

For those of us (myself included) that have made a typo during the ‘SEND’ process, each time we start typing that user name or email address the auto complete suggests the typo as well as the correct entry. Frustrating to say the least. Well now you can go to a Settings page and like Tag Delete, you can select and remove all instances of the recipient ‘for:’ tag. This obviously won’t undo the send event, but it does allow you to clean up the recipient list that appears when you start typing a recipients name in the SEND field.

On top of this there are the usual “minor bug fixes”. We also added the popular BrowseBar feature to the Network, Subscriptions and Inbox pages. The ability to ‘browse’ the links from my Network has already made my link review process much easier, hopefully you’ll find the same thing.

Enjoy!

Those of you that saw the previous post knew we were tinkering with Delicious support in the Australian version of Yahoo! Messenger for Windows. Well, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve recently enabled this functionality across all English versions of Yahoo! Messenger PC.

You can now save the links your ex-college buddy sends you rather than opening them in the office. No more copying and pasting links and no more losing important links. You can even save the links you send to others and then make a note in the TAGS field to make finding that link easier later on. This is particularly handy for those “I did send you that link! See, here’s the IToldYouSo tag I used” moments…

1. Place your mouse pointer over any link in the Yahoo! Messenger conversation window and click the Delicious ‘Bookmark’ button.
2. The ‘Save Bookmark’ window appears and allows you to start saving.
3. Once you’ve saved the link, Yahoo! Messenger confirms where you’ll see the data, which is especially important for new users.

As always, we’re going to keep working towards offering Delicious functionality in more places, and we’re certain that you’ll see more Delicious features in more places over the coming year. Not surprisingly the Yahoo! Messenger team was instrumental in adding this functional gem and we love them for it. Our favorite Instant Messenger client just got even better! :)

Be sure to let us know what you think and what you’d like to see in the future!

As you know, people from all over the world use Delicious. Although our interface is still English-only (thinking about new languages for the roadmap but nothing concrete yet), you’ll see that our bookmarks, tags and comments appear in many different languages.

Today, we have a brief note to our Australian users that sign into Delicious with a Yahoo! account.

You guys have been selected for a dry-run of the initial integration of Delicious and Yahoo! Messenger. If you move your mouse cursor over any link in your conversation window you’ll see the Delicious logo appear. Click that and we’ll open a ‘Save’ window for you.

Now you can easily save links to review later without interrupting your instant message conversations. Yah!

What about the rest of us? Once we gather some data, have a few cups of coffee, cram in some Foosball action and ensure we have enough machines to handle the traffic, we’ll enable the feature for other English versions of Yahoo! Messenger.

What else are we working on? We can’t tell you, it’s a secret. :p

It doesn’t have all the API’s needed and it’s missing a good chunk of the functionality we believe it needs, but we’re getting so many requests for the Chrome extension that we’re going to make this available sooner than we originally planned.

The core ethos here was to create a light save and bookmark retrieval process that matches the no-bulk mentality that was taken with Chrome. There is no sidebar. If you click anywhere on the page while the Save frame is opened, it’ll disappear. Some error messages are missing. These are relatively minor issues, but ones we plan to address in the very near future. However, we do most definitely want to hear from you. What rocks, what sucks, what do we need to add and whats going to happen in the last episode of LOST? We’d like feedback on these in our forums.

To install the extension, click here using Google Chrome.

To give you some insight on how this extension came to be, here is the lead engineer Vivek to give you the background:

Yes. We are available on Google Chrome!

That’s true. Delicious has added a new add-on to its belt and that’s for Google Chrome. It’s been a marvelous journey being in the ‘recommended’ list of Firefox Extensions and enjoying the luxury of being downloaded by more than 5 million Delicious lovers. Now it’s time to catch up with the latest browser!

“This missing Chrome plug-in is the main reason I haven’t switched completely from Firefox.” – Delicious user

All the Delicious users who feel the same can now enjoy the availability of Delicious bookmarking on Google Chrome with this add-on. The Delicious add-on for Google Chrome was initially developed as a hack at one of Yahoo!’s in-house hack events. The story goes like this…

“I always believed the hack event is a great platform for developers to demonstrate their ideas that have potential to become a product. I wanted to take advantage of this platform and started by actively participating in the in-house hack events. In 2007, I presented a hack called ‘Delicious on Mobile’ and I could see the product m.delicious.com shaping up.

In 2009, I had a strong feeling that we needed to increase our presence so that we could reach out to a wider audience. So I came up with two different hacks, one of them was ‘Delicious Compact’ which was written in .NET Compact Framework and it would run on all the latest Windows Mobile Devices.

Secondly, I read about Google Chrome and thought let’s build an add-on for this new browser. Since the extension API was under development, I had to use the Dev Channel builds of Google Chrome to experiment. The add-on I developed was simple, just a Delicious button in the address bar (page action) which would open a new popup window containing the Delicious Bookmarklet with current URL information being prefilled.

I was lucky enough to have good Product support at Delicious who encouraged this idea and we started working on a full version of the extension. As the APIs were under development we had to wait until they became available to provide the best possible features for the Chrome extension.”

Sync your Delicious Bookmarks

Now you can sync your Delicious bookmarks in Google Chrome using the add-on. All you need to do is just login to Delicious and all of your Delicious bookmarks are there!

Get your Delicious bookmarks right there in Omnibar

Once all your Delicious bookmarks are synced up you will notice them popping up in the Omnibar. i.e. the address bar of Google Chrome. You don’t need to search for your bookmarks separately as they will come up when you start typing matching words in the address bar.

Bookmark with a button

Now you can bookmark a URL on Delicious just by clicking a Tag button present beside the address bar. You can share the URL on twitter as well as with your friends using the same Tag button.

Regards,
Vivek

As promised we’ve just pushed live a few more changes that we’ve wanted to give you for a number of months. There are loads of minor UI and performance tweaks that most of you won’t notice, but there are some small things you might notice. Some of the minor changes include things like the ability to ‘Hide’ your fans list should any of them have embarrassing usernames, plus the ability to sign in as another user from the web-based save interfaces and main site. For those in the know, we’ve also added rel=”me” to the public profile URL, plus a plethora of other tweaks and fixes. Some of the larger changes include:

Hotlist
For those of you which have been with us for a while, the ‘Hotlist’ is back! Yeah, yeah, we know it never really went away but calling it ‘Popular Bookmarks’ when we already had ‘Popular’ just confused matters. Now the best of the best have the right name, and more importantly you can paginate to see previous items from the Hotlist! No more waking up in the early hours to ensure you don’t miss the great content surfaced by friends from Oceania or the late night coffee crew. All that historic content is now just a page away.

People
As you will have no doubt noticed, we’re gradually moving away from treating the ‘for:’ data as tags. It’s essentially a send event, and we’re moving towards reflecting that in the interface. The latest change sees them move from the list of Tags along the side of a users bookmarks into their own ‘People’ tab. This makes it much easier to find and filter by those users, and ensure your tag list isn’t cluttered with recipients.

Nothing super critical in this release to be sure, but the sheer number of minor tweaks necessitated a release. The next release will be more of the same with a few surprises here and there.

Enjoy!

Now that we’ve gotten some housework out of the way, we’ve been able to spend the first few weeks of 2010 finishing off some new features and correcting some long term annoyances. We think you’ll enjoy these, a lot!


Bookmark Display options

The Delicious bookmark display options were spread all over the page and subsequently there was more than one place to control how you view your content. So we combined them all and placed them to the right of the Tagbar, just beneath the bookmark count.

Privacy filter: This has been requested so many times and unfortunately put on the back burner in place of other features. We figured it was time for it to finally hit the streets. You can now filter your bookmarks by Only Private or Only Public.

Send recipients: (display of for:, @twitter & email addresses): The community is clearly divided on whether or not they want this information displayed or not, so we decided to give you the ability to ‘show’ or ‘hide’ that information. If you don’t want to see the history of who you’ve sent bookmarks to, you can hide them.

Open bookmarks in: Something else that both you and the Delicious team have been divided on. Should bookmarks open in the same window or a new tab? Well, we thought we’d let you decide want you want to do.


Tag options

Somewhat related to Bookmark Options, we also moved the ‘Tag Options’ out of the blue action box and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed. Here you get the same functionality as before, it’s just closer to the tags.

Browse these bookmarks

We’ve created a new feature that saves you the trouble of bouncing back and forth from Delicious when viewing more than one bookmark in a row.

Click the new link in the action in the upper right hand corner of a users page to see it in action


The feature opens the first bookmark and displays a small frame at the top of the page. From here you can paginate forwards through the bookmarks.

We’re still working on the feature and more functionality will be added over the coming months, but based on how useful we’ve found it, we wanted to give you a chance to start using it sooner rather than later. We’d love to get your feedback on this feature and suggestions for other features. We know what we want to add to it, but your responses will help us gauge what we should work on adding next.

Beyond these features we’ve improved the tag management functionality on our mobile site and while you might not notice the changes, we also fixed 50+ other minor bugs here and there.

What next?

There are a few long outstanding pet peeves that we want to get addressed before we tackle some of the larger projects planned for 2010. There will also be some more tweaks to current functionality that give better access to the great content we all help generate everyday, not to mention the ability to look up and connect to other friends that use Delicious. All of this we hope to give you before the end of March, plus a few other benefits we know you’ll love, but can’t spill the beans on just yet.

Keep bookmarking!

Simon