Social bookmarking site Delicious has been reborn with the help of AVOS, a company led by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube. The start-up bought Delicious from Yahoo! in April, and has spent the past months completely reconstructing the popular site. With the minds behind YouTube at the helm, Delicious is posed to emerge as a powerful social media company.
There have been significant changes to the eight-year-old site since Yahoo! sold it. AVOS has worked to enhance the site without removing the standard functions that veteran users are familiar with. To such ends, if you already have a Delicious account, you will still be able to access all of your saved bookmarks (which are now called “Links”). Users that enjoyed browsing links on the old version of Delicious will enjoy that the site’s digital strategy has been shifted the focus to social link sharing.
To support the change in direction, AVOS vastly improved Delicious’s site functionality. The previously cluttered navigation bar has been consolidated and streamlined, removing excess buttons while adding a better search function. Lists of links, called “Stacks” can be created to help users organize and share topics with one another. Want to share a stack filled with links and videos about the platypus and its gnarly venom? Well now you can!
With AVOS piloting Delicious and the new focus on social media strategy, the odds are good that the site will be a success.