Yes, it’s kind of hard to believe, but we’ve been chugging along for five years now.  In that time a huge number of people have made Delicious a part of their online lives.  We’re now up to 5.3 million users.  And with over 180 million unique URLs saved, together we have built a community resource that just keeps getting more interesting and more useful.

We took some major steps forward this year, including launching the new Delicious, releasing our new Internet Explorer add-on, and making major updates to our Firefox add-on.

Thanks for your continued support, and thanks for using Delicious!

It has been a few weeks now since we launched the new Delicious, and we wanted to take a moment to update you on how things are going so far.

Infrastructure
The most important news is that our new platform has been stable and is meeting our performance goals. In the days of the old Delicious, we had to put a lot of effort into just keeping the lights on and struggling to keep up with growth. With our new infrastructure, these problems are largely gone and our pagers have never been so quiet. But more importantly the Delicious service is now faster and more reliable, which was a key goal of this project. In fact, I’m very happy to say that Delicious has experienced zero downtime since the day after launch. (Hopefully now that I’ve said that we won’t discover an unshielded thermal exhaust port somewhere…)

Some of you have reported seeing error messages indicating you’ve been “blocked” from accessing Delicious or that the service is unavailable. This is not due to Delicious being down (it isn’t); rather it appears the primary cause is a bug in older versions of our Delicious Bookmarks add-on for Firefox. If you use our Firefox add-on please make sure you have the very latest version from here. You can also make sure you’re up-to-date by clicking “Find Updates” under “Tools” → “Add-ons” in Firefox.

Browser add-ons
Speaking of add-ons, we recently launched our Internet Explorer add-on. It includes most of the features offered by our popular Firefox version and works with IE 6 and 7 (IE 8 beta 2 generally works as well, although it won’t be official until IE 8 is). The response has been great so far; thanks to all of you who have tried it out. Your comments on the forum have helped us track down a number of bugs that we addressed in a major update last week. There were also some issues with our Firefox add-on immediately following the launch of the new Delicious, and we recently released an update for that as well. So please make sure you’re running our latest versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Design
We had two major goals for the new design. The first was to address the user feedback we’ve received over the last few years regarding usability problems, consistency issues, and interface bugs. Our second goal was to make Delicious even easier to understand and thus to bring new users into the community. So far it seems to be working on both counts. The majority of the feedback has been positive (thanks!), and we’re also seeing a notable increase in new users and general traffic across Delicious.

That said, we know that not all of you are fans of the new design. There has been plenty of vocal and well-reasoned feedback on the discussion forum, and we’ve been reading every post and email and responding as much as possible. We’ve also been taking action. Since the initial launch we’ve made more than 30 changes to the new interface, nearly all of them in direct response to user feedback. We’ve also fixed a number of bugs you pointed out. You can read more about these changes here.

Moving forward we will continue listening to and taking action based on your comments, questions, bug reports, and suggestions. We want to ensure that Delicious remains the greatest social bookmarking tool, both for new users and for the people who already know and love it. We’re also working on new functionality that you’ve been asking for, and we look forward to sharing more about that soon.

If you haven’t already, please join the conversation on our forum and let us know what you think. Thanks for using Delicious!

Over the past few days we’ve been transitioning Delicious over to our new platform, quietly starting with RSS feeds and APIs. Today we’re taking the final step and flipping the switch on the new web site: delicious.com.

The new Delicious is just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.  Here are the main changes:

Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another user’s public bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.  Check out the What’s New page for an overview of the changes, or watch this animation that sums it up nicely:

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.

It has taken us a while to get here, and we really appreciate all the patience and support you’ve shown us. Now that our new platform is in place we expect to release new features more quickly. Please check out the new site and then head over to our new discussion forum to let us know what you think and what you’d like to see next.  We’ll be listening.

We’ll also be posting to the blog soon to share some details about decisions we made and lessons we learned during the development and design process.

The Delicious Team

P.S. Comments are off on this post because we’d like you all to add your bug reports and feedback to the Delicious discussion forum (open to all registered Delicious users). This will be more organized and will allow us to respond to more comments.

After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven. When we release it, you’ll be automatically logged out of your account and will have to log in again, due to some changes we’re making behind the scenes.

That means now is a good time to make sure you know your username and password. Your username is what you see in the address bar when you visit your bookmarks (http://del.icio.us/your_username, soon to become http://delicious.com/your_username). And what’s your password? If you don’t remember, you can use our password reset tool to get a reset link delivered to the email address associated with your account.

But wait, is that email address correct and valid? You can check by visiting “change email” in your account settings when you’re logged in. Be sure to keep this address up to date. If the day comes when you’re logged out, you’ve forgotten your password, and the email address associated with your account is inaccessible or mistyped, we won’t be able to help you recover the password. So check it!

While we’re on the subject, remember that nobody from Delicious will ever ask you for your password. Also, don’t give your password to third-party sites that you don’t trust.

As we move toward launch day, we’ll keep you updated. Thanks for your patience and support, everyone.

For those of you who use Internet Explorer with del.icio.us, we’re announcing today the official release of the Delicious Bookmarks Add-on for Internet Explorer. In a nutshell, this extension brings you many of the best features of the Delicious Bookmarks Extension for Firefox while introducing a few new features of its own.

This extension works with XP and Vista for IE6 and IE7. IE8 should also work, but IE8 support is still in beta, since that browser isn’t final. Please go to our delicious-ie-extension group for comments and feedback regarding IE8.

Enjoy!

For more details on the IE extension, check out our original beta announcement. For the eager and impatient, download from our website.

Nick Nguyen
Senior Product Manager, del.icio.us