I wasn’t already using Delicious before they unveiled the redesign this week, so I’m not missing anything that was there before. That said, I’ve known about Delicious for years. I’ve checked it out from time to time, but just never found it all that appealing. I’m guessing I wasn’t alone, which could be why it almost died before Yahoo sold it to the YouTube founders.

The revamp caught my attention, because I like what they’re doing with “stacks”. These are essentially collections of bookmarks based on a specific topic, displayed in an interesting way. I see a lot of potential for information discovery in this concept, and I think the guys who created the world’s biggest video site might be onto something again. I don’t know that it’s going to be YouTube big, but so far, I think it’s going to be worth using.

The stacks concept is explained simply in this video:

They still have some work to do, however. There needs to be better browser extension tools and mobile apps, though the mobile site isn’t terrible.

I’m viewing the site from the perspective of a new user, as if it’s an entirely new product, but of course this really isn’t the case. Delicious has been around for years, and regardless of Yahoo’s disinterest in it, it does have a solid community, and many of them aren’t thrilled about the new changes.

While at its core, the new Delicious serves basically the same purpose as the old Delicious – social bookmarking – it is now being executed in a pretty different way.

John Blump, a WPN reader, commented:

- the main page is full with images?! information = 0
- i saved links which do NOT appear anywhere (and other which do) ?!
- when i want to save through my firefox add-on, every time i’m asked to login !
- when i do save a link, i cannot use MY TAGS any more ?!
- now i’ve got only 10 links per page ! the designer did not understand the aim is to get the most links per page NOT the least !

ReadWriteWeb blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick calls the new Delicious a “bitter disappointment.” But again, he also talks about how his site has used the service a lot.

Suman, commenting on a GigaOm post about the redesign, wrote:

I had a fairly bad experience with the new Delicious today. Just last week I had spent a few hours curating my saved bookmarks and organizing tags. The new Delicious doesn’t seem to know anything about it. All my effort is lost. There is no longer a bulk-edit function to redo my changes. I can no longer manage my tags – could find no option for deleting old tags. Some of my tags with special characters are now broken, I get a 404 when I try to access them. I am done. Goodbye Delicious.

A few more comments from Twitter:

It does seem pretty clear that the transition process didn’t go very smoothly, and that’s clearly irritated quite a few people. The comments in this article are just a small sampling of what’s out there. That doesn’t mean that people won’t like the new Delicious. Whether or not it can capture mainstream appeal reamins to be seen, and again, I think mobile apps could help with that. After using it for a day, I don’t think it’s perfect, but I expect they’ll continue to make improvements. I do think it has the foundation of something that could grow into a really interesting place to find content shared by yourself and others.

What do you think of the new Delicious? Were you using the old version? Let us know in the comments.