Del.icio.us have a new frontpage layout, the popular social bookmarking system have some particularities in its new layout that I wanted to comment on. First there is an answer to the trivial question : what is del.icio.us ? highlighted on the left : Keep, Share and Discover, with just one or two lines per title. Search favorites just in the middle, and in the right of the page a registration form ! This is not very common to have registration form in a frontpage, usually it’s a separated page even if the form have just few inputs inside. The case of delicious, the registration ask for a username, password twice and then an email. What is delicious, try it and then register ! which is a very intelligent and logic suite which work.
http://design.phpmagazine.net/upload/2006/05/del.icio.us-thumb.png
Then a little in the bottom, something for new and registred users which is the latest hot links, the new organization per hour is really cool and useful. But I don’t understand the choice of showing tags for only the hottest link ? Certainly there is lot of data in del.icio.us that allow them to provide rich content and very attractive service.


If we talk a little about delicious usage, we notice that most of the tags used are related to technology, internet, programming, webdesign, security … compared to other topics such politics, culture, entertainment, health, … which are in the end of the list ! Is this due to the idea of delicious itself as a web2.0 website, and geeky to it will certainly attract more geeks than others. Or is it due to a failure somewhere in the website design, which make it difficult to use for some category of users ?
Looking in technorati tags we don’t find this problem, in the Hot Tags This Hour you can find Bush, christianity, taylor hicks, as well as web2.0, yahoo, ecommerce … ! Certainly the two websites are different, but you notice for example that bush don’t figure on the popular links in del.icio.us. Studying this more close could help understand and detecting issues related to the kind of people using del.icio.us and those who don’t !
Conclusion
As you might understand a frontpage redesign didn’t came by chance and in this case it reflect issues that delicious is trying to find solutions for. Which is very simple to understand : the more registred users you have, the more accurate information you can provide.