del.icio.us blog

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

Since adding Yahoo! account support last month we’ve been working hard to increase the integration and start offering more Yahoo! features. New users will automatically share their public content with Yahoo! Updates as well as Delicious, so even more of your friends will get to see the great content you’re saving with the Delicious community. For those of you with Yahoo! accounts, you can go to Settings>Manage Account and enable the sharing functionality with the ‘Manage who sees your Updates’ link on Y! Updates.

For those of you that had a Delicious account and a Yahoo! account (like the whole Delicious team), we’ve added the ability to replace your Delicious login with your Yahoo! account. Go to Settings and select the new ‘Merge with Yahoo! account’ option to stop using your old Delicious credentials and instead sign in with your Yahoo! ID. Don’t worry, the link to get to your content won’t change. If delicious.com/i_am_awesome was your link before, it will still be your link after.

Enjoy!