Mathew Ingram notes that the new Delicious "isn't all that":

When I saw the news about the launch of Delicious 2.0, I can’t say I felt a huge wave of joy, despite the fact that I am what most people would probably consider a hard-core Delicious user, with about 10,000 webpages saved since I started using it. But not only didn’t I feel any joy at the news, I didn’t really feel anything at all. In part, that could be because the new Delicious interface has been rumoured to be coming any day now for about a year (or perhaps even more, I’ve lost track). Now that it has arrived, it’s definitely anti-climactic at best. It also seems a lot slower than the old one, even though it is supposed to be faster. Maybe 10,000 bookmarks is just too many for it to handle.

The root of this problem is a stupid decision that Yahoo made back when they bought Delicious: They insisted that it be rewritten in PHP. I know where that kind of thinking comes from; Yahoo is a largely PHP shop, so the classic management-think on it is "it'll be easier to maintain that way".

So... they took an application that was working well, and gave it a three year timeout. Ponder that for a moment: in today's fast moving web2.0 world, they gave it a three year timeout. Is it any wonder that it slipped way, way down the meme-meter? Now that they have a new version, and it turns out that it's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, they have a new round of "what have they been doing?" questions to answer.

I'll tell you what they've been doing... they've been wasting Yahoo's time and money on a consolidation exercise that took Delicious out of the game. Next time someone considers rewriting an app into (insert currently fashionable language here), ask yourself whether a three year long timeout will serve anyone's interests.

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