When I left Delicious a year ago, I had two simple reasons. First, Delicious was painfully stupidly slow. Second, Delicious had obviously been abandoned by its developers, since it remained stagnant for the previous year despite all the problems. So I moved over to Ma.gnolia which was bright, speedy and engaged with their community. I liked Ma.gnolia, I really did. It had some slick innovative features, like topical user groups. But its tag management was always weak and I’ve got a ton of tags to manage.
Recently Delicious underwent a significant redesign, so I gave them another shot. The UI and visual design have finally been improved. More importantly, Delicious runs quickly again. This improvement made a huge difference in my re-introduction. Importing my bookmarks ran quickly and smoothly. So far, I am pleased. I will write again after I have used it for a while.
To celebrate, I created this lovely tag cloud. Those of you who know me know I think tag clouds are useless. I was wrong: they make great art! Click the image to see the tool I made it with.
Interesting, I had the same experience with Delicious and just recently came back to it. I would have to agree with you on the tag cloud standpoint, but I did find a decent use for Wordle.
For writers, throw your document in and you can see if you are over utilizing adjectives or words that do not fit your characters or piece. The visual aspect is nice as well.
Julia, that is an excellent point!
[...] I started using Delicious again after a one-year hiatus. I am impressed with the new interface. At first, I though they just reskinned the old design – lipstick on a pig, if we are still allowed to use that phrase. After using it for a week, I see that they have made a number of subtle but crucial changes to the user interface. [...]
Now, if they’d only add some social features to the service (they could start with imho THE social feature of all: Find your friends who use Delicious..).