New look for online bookmark sharing service Delicious

Keeping track of web bookmarks has always been tricky for me. I might want a link I found at work when I'm at home or vice versa. I don't always stick with the same browser. Difficult I might be but the best solution I've found over the years is Delicious. The site has just had a redesign and is worth a look if you haven't tried it before.

The principle of Delicious is very simple. When you add a bookmark, it can be given any number of tags and a description. The tags are very important as they make it possible to find bookmarks again later. Suggested tags based on other people who have bookmarked the page are shown. The description is more of a way of remembering what in important about the link. 

Links can also be made private if that's important. Maybe you're working on a site and don't want news about it to be public.

The key to keeping Delicious has been making it as easy as possible to add new links. Opening another tab and logging in would be far from ideal. There used to be various browser plugins but these have been replaced with a bookmarklet. Simply drag and drop the link supplied on the help pages here on to the bookmark bar of your browser and it's ready to go. When the bookmarklet is clicked it opens a window for recording the website. 

Lists of bookmarks can be accessed as either RSS or JSON. The latter is a little more complicated but RSS feeds are easy to incorporate in blogs to promote links that you have found.

Searching should be simple with a single search box and a very similar style to twitter. Adding @ searches for particular users and # for tags. The Discover page is a good way to find up and coming links on the web.

There is an official app for the iPhone and iPad here on the iTunes app store (proper review to come soon). Hopefully there'll be one for Android coming soon as well.

The site did ok in the browser of our test Android Mobile so the lack of app doesn't stop this from being useful on the move. 

I'm hoping that the redesign spells a renaissance for Delicious as it's been a very useful tool over the years. I think it will although I still have the slight reservation that I can't see how it makes it's money. That reservation aside, this is the best way I've found for managing bookmarks across any number of computers and browsers.