fully armed and operational
It has been a few weeks now since we launched the new Delicious, and we wanted to take a moment to update you on how things are going so far.
Infrastructure
The most important news is that our new platform has been stable and is meeting our performance goals. In the days of the old Delicious, we had to put a lot of effort into just keeping the lights on and struggling to keep up with growth. With our new infrastructure, these problems are largely gone and our pagers have never been so quiet. But more importantly the Delicious service is now faster and more reliable, which was a key goal of this project. In fact, I’m very happy to say that Delicious has experienced zero downtime since the day after launch. (Hopefully now that I’ve said that we won’t discover an unshielded thermal exhaust port somewhere…)
Some of you have reported seeing error messages indicating you’ve been “blocked†from accessing Delicious or that the service is unavailable. This is not due to Delicious being down (it isn’t); rather it appears the primary cause is a bug in older versions of our Delicious Bookmarks add-on for Firefox. If you use our Firefox add-on please make sure you have the very latest version from here. You can also make sure you’re up-to-date by clicking “Find Updates†under “Tools” → “Add-ons” in Firefox.
Browser add-ons
Speaking of add-ons, we recently launched our Internet Explorer add-on. It includes most of the features offered by our popular Firefox version and works with IE 6 and 7 (IE 8 beta 2 generally works as well, although it won’t be official until IE 8 is). The response has been great so far; thanks to all of you who have tried it out. Your comments on the forum have helped us track down a number of bugs that we addressed in a major update last week. There were also some issues with our Firefox add-on immediately following the launch of the new Delicious, and we recently released an update for that as well. So please make sure you’re running our latest versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Design
We had two major goals for the new design. The first was to address the user feedback we’ve received over the last few years regarding usability problems, consistency issues, and interface bugs. Our second goal was to make Delicious even easier to understand and thus to bring new users into the community. So far it seems to be working on both counts. The majority of the feedback has been positive (thanks!), and we’re also seeing a notable increase in new users and general traffic across Delicious.
That said, we know that not all of you are fans of the new design. There has been plenty of vocal and well-reasoned feedback on the discussion forum, and we’ve been reading every post and email and responding as much as possible. We’ve also been taking action. Since the initial launch we’ve made more than 30 changes to the new interface, nearly all of them in direct response to user feedback. We’ve also fixed a number of bugs you pointed out. You can read more about these changes here.
Moving forward we will continue listening to and taking action based on your comments, questions, bug reports, and suggestions. We want to ensure that Delicious remains the greatest social bookmarking tool, both for new users and for the people who already know and love it. We’re also working on new functionality that you’ve been asking for, and we look forward to sharing more about that soon.
If you haven’t already, please join the conversation on our forum and let us know what you think. Thanks for using Delicious!
September 30th, 2008
