Del.icio.us Gets a Makeover

Yahoo has finally begun rolling out some of the new del.icio.us features that it’s been whispering about for years. In addition to a new look and feel, some of these features include:

• customizable detail levels
• alphabetical sorting
• contextual search
• top 10 tags
• sub menus
• auto-complete text fields

The url has also changed from del.icio.us to delicious.com. Although del.icio.us still forwards to the new URL, I’m not sure what the purpose of this was. In my personal opinion the del.icio.us URL was one of the most impressive web branding campaigns I’ve come across. In a time when everything was turning up .com, .net or .org, del.icio.us launched with a name that was instantly recognizable, offering a trademark-ready url that was also the company name. The technique has since been copied by a number of services including last.fm, lifestream.fm and more. Although many people, myself included, took a curiously long time to remember just how to spell ‘delicious’ and where to place the dots, it was obvious that people could still find the service when they needed it.

The company offers this explanation:

So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends. Of course the old del.icio.us domain and all its URLs will continue to work. Also note that the domain change requires a new login cookie, which is why everyone has to log in again.

What’s next for del.icio.us? I’m sure Yahoo is looking for ways to incorporate personalized del.icio.us bookmarks into user search results. They’ve also been very vocal about finding a successful monetization model.