In the last week, we’ve seen major changes from Google+ and Facebook. You can now add Delicious to that mix. You’ll recall that last December, Yahoo! decided to sell Delicious, and then in April, Delicious announced it had been acquired by AVOS.
And for the following five months, everything seemed to be moving ahead steadily, with no visible change in the interface or service of Delicious.
Until today, that is.
If you head over to Delicious.com, you’ll find that rather than being greeted by a wall of links, tags and descriptions, you’ll be met with a much more visual interface – completely driven by images, as a matter of fact. It’s very reminiscent of Flipboard or other similar iPad apps that rely on a thumbnail and a headline to encourage further exploration.
The images are taken from a new feature on the site called Stacks. Everyone can group their tagged items together in a broader category called “Stacks.” This is akin to what used to be called “bundles” on Delicious. Now, you can share a set of links in a visual way to tell a story, provide context or help walk colleagues or customers through concepts in a step-by-step way. This video from their help page helps to explain it:
When you make your way through the Stacks, you’ll find that you can view the images in a way that makes sense to you, as there are four different views: media, grid, list and full. Each is shown here:
Since there’s so much content on the web (and so little time!), we’re really past the Age of Information and fully into the Age of Discovery. Not discovery in terms of being the first to unearth a new idea, concept or artifact, but rather the realization of common knowledge, interests and expertise to bring us closer together.
This is the powerful notion that’s being Spotify, the music-sharing service that’s so popular thanks to Facebook’s recent changes. On Delicious, the ability to search by category and interest (rather than being bombarded by random sharing of music that may or may not interest you) means that you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for or at least that you’ll be able to narrow a search without too much trouble.
The changes are likely to seem a little jarring to long-time users of the service, but for tablet owners, this kind of visual presentation of information that makes sense. Since users can toggle back and forth between views, it’s even more appealing; in these times, we never know what our users are going to prefer, and we can’t simply rely on the one size fits all approach any more.
In the last week, we’ve seen major changes from Google+ and Facebook. You can now add Delicious to that mix. You’ll recall that last December, Yahoo! decided to sell Delicious, and then in April, Delicious announced it had been acquired by AVOS.