I have used delicious, the bookmarking service, for just on five years now and over that time added around 1500 bookmarks. This suggests to me that I am a heavy, but not compulsive boomarker—I tend to only add pages that I think I will have a reasonably good chance of wanting to reference in the future.

I am (or rather, was) an unabashed fan of the service. To the point where earlier this year I wrote a Surfraw elvis to search the site. As this would suggest, I use the site frequently, not just to bookmark or retrieve my own pages, but to search for other pages that people have considered “bookmark-worthy” (which is generally a pretty good indicator of quality).

Like many comitted users, when the news leaked out late last year that Yahoo was shuttering delicious, I jumped to Pinboard and have been synching my bookmarks between the two sites since. In retrospect, that turned out to be an excellent decision.

The “new” delicious was launched overnight and I think it is fair to say that it has been completely and utterly eviscerated. It has gone from being a site that served a very specific (and incredibly useful) purpose—saving and tagging web pages for future use—to a bland, lowest-common-denominator, generic “social” site, like countless others that have arrived and disappeared with quirky names like Plurk, Plonker, etc..

The site looks good; all light and airy and spacious (that space will, I am sure, be quickly filled with advertising), but they have stripped all the utility from the site. You can no longer actually access and manage your bookmarks. It is a colossal failure.

I have 757 tags. I know that tag clouds are considered old hat, but on a site built on taxonomies, they are still an incredibly effective way of presenting information. The new delicious has dispensed with them. They have also decided that I don’t need to see all of my tags, so I can now only view 50 of them. Fifty out of seven hundred and fifty. Presumably I am expected to guess all the rest…

^{The new tag display on the left and the old, as a cloud, on the right.}

These aren’t options, though. All of the settings to display tags, tag bundles, etc., and the options to edit tags have been removed. You can’t access any of the tools to manage your bookmarks. The designers have decreed that you can no longer manage your information in a useful way. Morons.

The clueless mediocrities responsible for this will probably think that they are reinventing the site and making it relevant for a broader, less geeky market. And they are probably right. The fact that the site looks remarkably like a phone app suggests that sort of studied rush to the bottom.

What they have done is something of an achievement on one level, though. They have made Yahoo look good. In all the time that Yahoo owned delicious, they were only able to neglect it; these new clowns have completely fscked it…

If you bookmark sites because you are semi-intelligent and you recognize that being able to easily access and manage information effectively is critical to your intellectual and social wellbeing, then head over to Pinboard and sign up now.