For a long time, one of my most used sites on the Internet has easily been delicious.  It’s not sexy and glamorous like Facebook or twitter, though it has always sat in the background, saving my links, and (with surprising frequency) been there when I’ve needed a quick lookup for programming references, business ideas, inspiring talks, and anything else I’ve saved with the intention to read again. 

Over the years I’ve seen it slowly stagnate with slower and slower performance, a sleuth of horrible redesigns, and a general lack of innovation in the space, leaving the room for other providers like Pinboard, Evernote and Licorize to fill the gap.

Last week, delicious re-launched again (with their new owners Avos, founders of YouTube) with more of a focus on the visual and social aspect of online bookmarking.

When I first loaded it up the first thing I thought was “wow, I like it”.  

The second thing I thought was, “wow, it’s slow”.  

And the third, “there’s a lot of white space”.  

The feature set is limited (compared to the old delicious), though I’d image if you were to come in fresh you would still find it quite usable and fun to play around with, especially with the Stacks concept for publishing your favourite links (though I’m still having trouble figuring out what this is for exactly).

Over the last week I’ve been keeping an eye on it to see if this is just lipstick on a pig, or if the team at Avos are actively maintaining and iterating on it, and by the looks of things they have been!

Already the white space issue has been resolved, and the number of links per page has been increased.  The speed issues have been resolved, and the Chrome extension has been fixed to work again.

I’ve recently stumbled upon their delicious beta blog and found a post saying that my most missed features, tag bundles, is being worked on

Tag Bundles: We have retained all tag bundle data, and are working to expose this for users.

From a service which was folded into Yahoo! a little over 5 years ago, and neglected ever since, it’s good to see fresh life breathed into it again.  I only hope the same can be done with Flickr …