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Social bookmarking wunderkind Joshua Schachter and his team at Delicious have dropped the dots (sort of), sped up searches, and added an assortment of new features. You're going to need a new bookmarklet.

Schachter and company have asked for feedback on the next version of Delicious, with a few current users receiving invitations to take a peek at the revamped bookmarking site. Here's the new site (click for full size):

Delicious Preps Tasty New Site

The new site has muted the brighter blue color of the old Delicious, and displays a smaller logo. Navigation allows access to three main sections: Bookmarks, People, and Tags. Searching should be much quicker, with options to limit or expand queries, from one's profile to everyone's Bookmarks.

Their Tag Bar now offers auto-completion for quicker navigation and the ability to sort them by recency, alphabet, or popularity. That sort can be reversed as desired, too.

"Say goodbye to salmon on blue!" when it comes to determining how many people like a bookmark. The width and shade of the blue box around the save count will show its popularity; clicking the box shows how others have bookmarked the page.

Sidebars on the right side of the page will show the top ten tags someone has for their profile. Tag bundles listed there are expandable, to show all of that bundle's bookmarks. Bulk edit options permit the bookmarker to work with a number of bookmarks at once.

Delicious had this to say about the preview edition in their invitation:

This Preview is a "sandbox" environment, which means that we’ve imported your data from your live Delicious account, and that any changes that you make inside the Preview will be totally lost when it ends. This is good: you can play around, delete things, rename tags to strange characters, and test it all out without worrying that you’ve messed up your collection of bookmarks. If you do wish to keep the changes you’ve made, you can use the export tool in your Preview settings.

The Preview won't go live for some time, as they continue to sort out design and data issues as they occur. For those who have been invited to view the Preview, Delicious is taking feedback in their forums.