AVOS!Delicious: The Good, The Bad & The Future
I, like many of you, knew it was coming. I just thought I would have more time. Yes, I am talking about the makeover the new owners have given Delicious.com. Rather than put up a beta-site for people to test and give feedback first (Yahoo, for all you do wrong, I appreciate this about you so much), this morning I woke up to the new version of the site. My immediate reaction was horror and confusion, but that is my reaction to any massive change so I decided to wait a few hours and poke at it to see what I actually thought rather than write a post consisting of more exclamation points than letters. I've played with the new site and watched the reactions unfold on LJ, DW and Twitter for the past few hours so I now feel qualified to give some opinions on the changes. Now I just have to organize my four pages of scribbled notes.
The New:
Stacks
To be honest, I didn't see the point of their "playlist of the web" when I was reading interviews. Still, I was sure that people would come up with something cool to use this new organization feature. I was not anticipating the removal of all the other organization features and I am not sure how this can act as a replacement. I decided to give them a try anyway.
I created a test stack of new bookmarks. From there I managed to follow it on a test account. You still have to click on the stack to view it. It doesn't list all the bookmarks together. Frustrating, since why not just bookmark it on my computer? But, decided not to give up yet. I then updated the stack.
It took a bit of time to update, but as this is roll-out day, no big deal. Checked the dummy account following my stack. Not sure what the point of following is, really, given that the only indication of updates is the number of links as far as I can see. It doesn't give the last update time. As if we are going to remember how many bookmarks each stack has to know whether to click it or not. Yes, click it. There is no aggregation of bookmarks on what you are following. It is just a list of the stacks (or people) and you have to check each individually. Even better, you CAN'T SEE THE TAGS on the link within the stack. Not just for the followers. I can't see them for my own stack!
Bonus: the bookmarks created within the stack, I couldn't see how to tag them or add descriptions during creation. Some of them auto-tagged without any input from me leading to some strange tagging that did not match my system. Others have no tags at all. If you want to comment, you have to go back and edit them. You can add comments from within the stack by clicking edit. BUT YOU CAN'T ADD TAGS!
So, creating bookmarks within a stack isn't a good plan. And, as of yet, the comments I've added have not shown up in my bookmarks, just the stack. I don't know if this is just a delay or a "feature". Thinking it is a "feature". It does make sense, if you can have different comments for the same bookmark in different stacks, but we shall see. Might get a little annoying if you have to change your comments for each stack, though, rather than just the bookmark when you update something.
Only interesting thing was the automatic addition of images for the bookmarks in the stack (not my links) and the stack itself. This may have some benefit if it helps someone remember what page they were after using a memory of the image. Unfortunately, I can't seem to turn it off. And, if I edit, I can only select from the pictures it gives me which appear to be taken from the page. I can't pick my own to upload. No picture doesn't seem to be an option.
Stacks also require between 3 and 250 bookmarks. You can't just put all your FANDOMX recs into one if you think you'll go over. And no stacks for rare pairings etc. that don't have 3 bookmarks yet.
The Old (and how it has changed):
Searching
And I thought it wasn't very good before! I did a test search for "delicious". Got nothing about it. Instead, I got bookmarks of people's bookmarks. Also, no summaries. Not very useful. The options to search your bookmarks, everyone's, network etc. are also missing. Instead, it searches your links (if logged in), stacks and everyone. There are no pages. Instead, you have to click "view all" and then load more. That isn't going to get tiresome quickly if you want to skip ahead. Tried, "arthur" since that should get some of my own bookmarks. That worked better. I can see the summaries of my own bookmarks. Still no summaries on everyone else's.
I clicked on some of them and there ARE summaries. They just aren't displaying in the search results. Nice.
Link Pages
The link pages themselves have updated. I am only seeing the names of people who put comments. I do not see their tags. Or when they bookmarked. The only date information is the first bookmark made. Tags are to the side, sized by popularity as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if there is a limit to the number of tags that are displayed, but given other factors, I'm not hopeful. I can't tell who is using what and just click on them to search their links by that tag. Instead this does all bookmarks with that tag. You have to go to the person individually. However, you don't know what tags they use in order to do a search. And, as you can't see all the names, have good luck using it. But don't worry, it gets worse. I saved the best for last.
Following (your Network)
As you knew it, your network is gone. It is now hidden in Following under a drop down menu that pops up if you hover over your name. You can't see anyone else's Following section. Again, as with stacks, the links are not aggregated. This is just a list of people. You have to click on each name to see their bookmarks. This will take you to their stacks, NOT their bookmarks. That is a second click. There is no other information besides their icon and their name with the option to unfollow. There is no way to know if they've updated. The whole point of the network was to not check each person individually and now that is gone.
Navigating by Tags
Old!Delicious was based around the idea of tagging for organization. There were a few handy things (such as NOT tag X) that I would of liked, but, overall, it worked. Tagging was how everything was done. Surely, no one would think to change such a fundamental thing without doing a beta test first? Au contraire, mes amis. Au contraire. I have saved the best for last.
Tag Bundles and Your Tag Organization
All that time and effort you spent on organizing your tags? Wasted. Tag Bundles are gone. And Stacks are not a substitute since they aren't based around tags at all. You can't even see the tags within a stack! But don't worry, it gets better.
Your tags are not not listed in alphabetical or popular order! They are listed by the 50 (or 40 or something) last used tags as far as I can figure. That is just a guess at what is going on. It is hard to tell. At first I thought that they were ordered by popularity, but there was no way the "fandom:doctorwho" was more popular than my "type:slash" tag. That's right. Combine that with no auto-fill and it is going to be fun going through your own bookmarks. Forget other people. How do you find the stuff you've saved? I guess you are supposed to filter things down? Nope! Your tag list doesn't update when you filter. That's right, you can't see the associated tags. Well, I guess you'll just have to do it the hard way by guessing the top tag and paging through the results.
Tag Filtering
But don't worry, they've fixed that too. You don't have to page through the results. You see only the last 10 bookmarks when you filter by tag. That's right. The search feature has a view all. I haven't found it for the tag filter. Either you don't filter and page through all your bookmarks (10 at a time) or you have to guess at your tags and hope you don't have too many things bookmarked with them. You can't click to another page or to display more bookmarks! You only get 10! You can filter more, but if you've saved 11 "sam/dean" "h/c" "kink:bdsm" fics somewhere within the hundreds of SPN bookmarks you have, have fun. And you won't realize it, because they don't tell you how many results you have for each tag or combination thereof. Why bother, if you are only going to display 10 bookmarks anyway?
The "\"
Of course, you would be doing that anyway. \'s in tags don't work. Other special characters don't either. This one, I'm a bit more forgiving on. It sucks for fandom, but is understandable since most other people don't use it. I just wish it had been part of their warning when we still had access to the mass change of tags features. As of yet, I haven't found any way to mass tag editing.
(My cynical roommate pointed out that the lack of \'s could be deliberate to remove us from the user base. Don't really think that is necessary. Lack of basic functionality will do the same thing quite well.)
Search by Tag
Rather than use the Search box, it is still possible to search generally by tag. In theory. Unfortunately, it works about as well as the text search does. Some tags I know exist because I use them, but nothing shows up. As mentioned previously, the \'s are broken, but these have no \'s and still work to filter on my own links page. Nothing.
Searching for "spn" OTH does bring up results. You'll notice something funny immediately about them. They only have the SPN tag. I tried this with other tags and got the same result. It seems to be sorting results by tag in some strange way. This leads to all the results with ONLY THAT TAG being first. The most categorized, useful links are hundreds of links in. Bonus: No descriptions. At least you can see the tags and click to the next page. Trying to sort by "recent" or "popular" gives no results. I'm leaning towards this being just a bug, given that it does seem to have links for it with URLs that make sense for it. Related tags here are done by page. Unlike when you filter a user's bookmarks. Because as we all know, consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Subscriptions
If the recent/TAG doesn't work, I bet you are wondering about subscriptions. Or NOT. Because they don't exist! That's right, you now can't just put "pairingX" in your subscriptions and wait for the fic to come to you. Especially true for someone like me who reads many rare pairings in hundreds of fandoms. They don't have communities for them! There are no newsletters. I am crying a little as I write this.
Target Demographic
Someone other than us. As it stands right now, the target demographic appears to be someone who doesn't entirely know how the internet and bookmarking work. Or maybe that is the new owners. Assuming they get the bugs fixed, I am thinking that it still isn't us. I don't mean us as in "fandom", I mean us as in people who use social bookmarking a lot. Those of us that are power users. They are looking for an entirely different user base and don't care if they keep this one. They just wanted the name and the already existing links to give them a boost. I am not sure if it will work. Many of the "features" just add too much effort and overhead to use. If the existing techy and fandom groups find it too difficult, can you imagine your Mother/Sister/Grandpa/(insert appropriate person here) attempting to use it? Or do you think that they would give up after the first day or two, going back to their previous networks/computer bookmarks and write the whole thing off as too much work? They already have a Facebook and a Twitter, do they really need this too if the bookmarking functionality is broken? And even then, this is something where there IS competition. There are other social bookmarking sites that WORK. Not as well as the Old!Delicious, for fandom purposes, but that was more the people using it than the features.
What is this fuckery? Where did my bookmarks go? How can I get the old site back?
There is a place to give feedback for the new site. Let us swamp them with feedback and let them know exactly why and how the new design won't work. Maybe they just don't realize how badly they fucked everything up. It is clearly our duty to tell them. And if nothing else, to vent our rage at the appropriate people.
Also, if your bookmarks have been fucked by the move, let them know. If you forgot to opt in, some of us backed things up. If your bookmarks have been fucked over, your tags gone etc. even though you opted in and you don't have a backup, let me know. When I initially started backing everything up, I didn't know how to check for opt-in so I saved a lot of people's links. I didn't delete them in anticipation of all this crap. I probably have backups. You may be able to get those tags/descriptions/links back. (No tag bundles. Sorry.)
The Future (Yes, I am finally getting to the title)
Now, I see the exodus begun in December steaming ahead. Diigo and Pinboard are going to be getting a lot of new users today. I'm tempted myself, even though there are things about each that I don't like.
I think it is also time to bring up a topic that has been circling in the back of my mind since the great exodus of December. Fandom Delicious. Or, as it is called in my head (and heart), fic.ticio.us. Because it is too good to be true. As much as I love AO3 (and I do, with many hearts), I don't bookmark there. I bookmark fannishly most of the time, but I want to be able to put that reference material I'm saving for a fic I'm writing with my fic bookmarks. I want to have something that has the features fandom wants, but can be used for other things. For me copyright is a fannish issue, but I know that isn't true for everyone. I want to be able to put those bookmarks there, even if they aren't directly tied to fannish meta. I want to read other fans bookmarks on the issue because they have opinions I value, but they also understand my perspective. I want a place where fen can bookmark whatever, but still have things like linked chapters and series, public and private tags (not just bookmarks) etc. I want something for us and by us that we can use in multiple contexts. Or even open up to other users. Just, they aren't the target demographic. We are.
And I am willing to put time into coding something like this. Possibly a lot of time, since I don't do web programming and would have to learn more to be useful at it. The question is, does anyone else care? Would anyone else be willing to help? To use, even? That I don't know, but is one of the things I would like to ask.
Reaction Post Links
As I spent some time going through LJ and DW looking for opinions and if anyone else had found the next page option for tags OMG, I accumulated a bunch of links. I figured I might as well share them.
Oh my god Reaction of deliciouslymad community.
Well, fudge!
Delicious Mentions AO3 bookmark improvements that are coming.
Delicious fail Talks about what is still in progress and should have been completed before release.
Delicious Links to diigo and pinboard. Recommends moving.
Delicious Bookmarks have changed and I hate it. Her title sums up how I feel. I had to link to it.
NOOOOOO and More on the Delicious kerfuffle Someone moving and glad they backed up. I appreciate the rant. I really do.
Delicious fuckery and Diigo again Fandom group created on Diigo to reconnect people.
Delicious v/s Diigo v/s Pinboard As it says.
I have more links, but no time to put them together right now. (Or a spell check. I'm sorry.) So, that will be updated this evening.
Please, if you have comments on the issue, leave them. Also, please link to this post for interested parties.
Edit: 10:30 AM Wed. So many things to reply to! I didn't get home until 1AM last night and now I'm at work. I will reply and put up updates once I get a chance. That may not be until tonight. Thanks for all the enthusiasm and for pointing me to the /report. I just sent a message, so we'll see what is going on. ETA: 7PM Wed. Sorry for the delay. I'm poking at a bunch of things right now. I realized that I don't have time to round up links. Don't worry, things are happening. I will be making updates when there is something concrete. Fannish-delicious or the equivalent WILL happen, one way or another.
The New:
Stacks
To be honest, I didn't see the point of their "playlist of the web" when I was reading interviews. Still, I was sure that people would come up with something cool to use this new organization feature. I was not anticipating the removal of all the other organization features and I am not sure how this can act as a replacement. I decided to give them a try anyway.
I created a test stack of new bookmarks. From there I managed to follow it on a test account. You still have to click on the stack to view it. It doesn't list all the bookmarks together. Frustrating, since why not just bookmark it on my computer? But, decided not to give up yet. I then updated the stack.
It took a bit of time to update, but as this is roll-out day, no big deal. Checked the dummy account following my stack. Not sure what the point of following is, really, given that the only indication of updates is the number of links as far as I can see. It doesn't give the last update time. As if we are going to remember how many bookmarks each stack has to know whether to click it or not. Yes, click it. There is no aggregation of bookmarks on what you are following. It is just a list of the stacks (or people) and you have to check each individually. Even better, you CAN'T SEE THE TAGS on the link within the stack. Not just for the followers. I can't see them for my own stack!
Bonus: the bookmarks created within the stack, I couldn't see how to tag them or add descriptions during creation. Some of them auto-tagged without any input from me leading to some strange tagging that did not match my system. Others have no tags at all. If you want to comment, you have to go back and edit them. You can add comments from within the stack by clicking edit. BUT YOU CAN'T ADD TAGS!
So, creating bookmarks within a stack isn't a good plan. And, as of yet, the comments I've added have not shown up in my bookmarks, just the stack. I don't know if this is just a delay or a "feature". Thinking it is a "feature". It does make sense, if you can have different comments for the same bookmark in different stacks, but we shall see. Might get a little annoying if you have to change your comments for each stack, though, rather than just the bookmark when you update something.
Only interesting thing was the automatic addition of images for the bookmarks in the stack (not my links) and the stack itself. This may have some benefit if it helps someone remember what page they were after using a memory of the image. Unfortunately, I can't seem to turn it off. And, if I edit, I can only select from the pictures it gives me which appear to be taken from the page. I can't pick my own to upload. No picture doesn't seem to be an option.
Stacks also require between 3 and 250 bookmarks. You can't just put all your FANDOMX recs into one if you think you'll go over. And no stacks for rare pairings etc. that don't have 3 bookmarks yet.
The Old (and how it has changed):
Searching
And I thought it wasn't very good before! I did a test search for "delicious". Got nothing about it. Instead, I got bookmarks of people's bookmarks. Also, no summaries. Not very useful. The options to search your bookmarks, everyone's, network etc. are also missing. Instead, it searches your links (if logged in), stacks and everyone. There are no pages. Instead, you have to click "view all" and then load more. That isn't going to get tiresome quickly if you want to skip ahead. Tried, "arthur" since that should get some of my own bookmarks. That worked better. I can see the summaries of my own bookmarks. Still no summaries on everyone else's.
I clicked on some of them and there ARE summaries. They just aren't displaying in the search results. Nice.
Link Pages
The link pages themselves have updated. I am only seeing the names of people who put comments. I do not see their tags. Or when they bookmarked. The only date information is the first bookmark made. Tags are to the side, sized by popularity as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if there is a limit to the number of tags that are displayed, but given other factors, I'm not hopeful. I can't tell who is using what and just click on them to search their links by that tag. Instead this does all bookmarks with that tag. You have to go to the person individually. However, you don't know what tags they use in order to do a search. And, as you can't see all the names, have good luck using it. But don't worry, it gets worse. I saved the best for last.
Following (your Network)
As you knew it, your network is gone. It is now hidden in Following under a drop down menu that pops up if you hover over your name. You can't see anyone else's Following section. Again, as with stacks, the links are not aggregated. This is just a list of people. You have to click on each name to see their bookmarks. This will take you to their stacks, NOT their bookmarks. That is a second click. There is no other information besides their icon and their name with the option to unfollow. There is no way to know if they've updated. The whole point of the network was to not check each person individually and now that is gone.
Navigating by Tags
Old!Delicious was based around the idea of tagging for organization. There were a few handy things (such as NOT tag X) that I would of liked, but, overall, it worked. Tagging was how everything was done. Surely, no one would think to change such a fundamental thing without doing a beta test first? Au contraire, mes amis. Au contraire. I have saved the best for last.
Tag Bundles and Your Tag Organization
All that time and effort you spent on organizing your tags? Wasted. Tag Bundles are gone. And Stacks are not a substitute since they aren't based around tags at all. You can't even see the tags within a stack! But don't worry, it gets better.
Your tags are not not listed in alphabetical or popular order! They are listed by the 50 (or 40 or something) last used tags as far as I can figure. That is just a guess at what is going on. It is hard to tell. At first I thought that they were ordered by popularity, but there was no way the "fandom:doctorwho" was more popular than my "type:slash" tag. That's right. Combine that with no auto-fill and it is going to be fun going through your own bookmarks. Forget other people. How do you find the stuff you've saved? I guess you are supposed to filter things down? Nope! Your tag list doesn't update when you filter. That's right, you can't see the associated tags. Well, I guess you'll just have to do it the hard way by guessing the top tag and paging through the results.
Tag Filtering
But don't worry, they've fixed that too. You don't have to page through the results. You see only the last 10 bookmarks when you filter by tag. That's right. The search feature has a view all. I haven't found it for the tag filter. Either you don't filter and page through all your bookmarks (10 at a time) or you have to guess at your tags and hope you don't have too many things bookmarked with them. You can't click to another page or to display more bookmarks! You only get 10! You can filter more, but if you've saved 11 "sam/dean" "h/c" "kink:bdsm" fics somewhere within the hundreds of SPN bookmarks you have, have fun. And you won't realize it, because they don't tell you how many results you have for each tag or combination thereof. Why bother, if you are only going to display 10 bookmarks anyway?
The "\"
Of course, you would be doing that anyway. \'s in tags don't work. Other special characters don't either. This one, I'm a bit more forgiving on. It sucks for fandom, but is understandable since most other people don't use it. I just wish it had been part of their warning when we still had access to the mass change of tags features. As of yet, I haven't found any way to mass tag editing.
(My cynical roommate pointed out that the lack of \'s could be deliberate to remove us from the user base. Don't really think that is necessary. Lack of basic functionality will do the same thing quite well.)
Search by Tag
Rather than use the Search box, it is still possible to search generally by tag. In theory. Unfortunately, it works about as well as the text search does. Some tags I know exist because I use them, but nothing shows up. As mentioned previously, the \'s are broken, but these have no \'s and still work to filter on my own links page. Nothing.
Searching for "spn" OTH does bring up results. You'll notice something funny immediately about them. They only have the SPN tag. I tried this with other tags and got the same result. It seems to be sorting results by tag in some strange way. This leads to all the results with ONLY THAT TAG being first. The most categorized, useful links are hundreds of links in. Bonus: No descriptions. At least you can see the tags and click to the next page. Trying to sort by "recent" or "popular" gives no results. I'm leaning towards this being just a bug, given that it does seem to have links for it with URLs that make sense for it. Related tags here are done by page. Unlike when you filter a user's bookmarks. Because as we all know, consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Subscriptions
If the recent/TAG doesn't work, I bet you are wondering about subscriptions. Or NOT. Because they don't exist! That's right, you now can't just put "pairingX" in your subscriptions and wait for the fic to come to you. Especially true for someone like me who reads many rare pairings in hundreds of fandoms. They don't have communities for them! There are no newsletters. I am crying a little as I write this.
Target Demographic
Someone other than us. As it stands right now, the target demographic appears to be someone who doesn't entirely know how the internet and bookmarking work. Or maybe that is the new owners. Assuming they get the bugs fixed, I am thinking that it still isn't us. I don't mean us as in "fandom", I mean us as in people who use social bookmarking a lot. Those of us that are power users. They are looking for an entirely different user base and don't care if they keep this one. They just wanted the name and the already existing links to give them a boost. I am not sure if it will work. Many of the "features" just add too much effort and overhead to use. If the existing techy and fandom groups find it too difficult, can you imagine your Mother/Sister/Grandpa/(insert appropriate person here) attempting to use it? Or do you think that they would give up after the first day or two, going back to their previous networks/computer bookmarks and write the whole thing off as too much work? They already have a Facebook and a Twitter, do they really need this too if the bookmarking functionality is broken? And even then, this is something where there IS competition. There are other social bookmarking sites that WORK. Not as well as the Old!Delicious, for fandom purposes, but that was more the people using it than the features.
What is this fuckery? Where did my bookmarks go? How can I get the old site back?
There is a place to give feedback for the new site. Let us swamp them with feedback and let them know exactly why and how the new design won't work. Maybe they just don't realize how badly they fucked everything up. It is clearly our duty to tell them. And if nothing else, to vent our rage at the appropriate people.
Also, if your bookmarks have been fucked by the move, let them know. If you forgot to opt in, some of us backed things up. If your bookmarks have been fucked over, your tags gone etc. even though you opted in and you don't have a backup, let me know. When I initially started backing everything up, I didn't know how to check for opt-in so I saved a lot of people's links. I didn't delete them in anticipation of all this crap. I probably have backups. You may be able to get those tags/descriptions/links back. (No tag bundles. Sorry.)
The Future (Yes, I am finally getting to the title)
Now, I see the exodus begun in December steaming ahead. Diigo and Pinboard are going to be getting a lot of new users today. I'm tempted myself, even though there are things about each that I don't like.
I think it is also time to bring up a topic that has been circling in the back of my mind since the great exodus of December. Fandom Delicious. Or, as it is called in my head (and heart), fic.ticio.us. Because it is too good to be true. As much as I love AO3 (and I do, with many hearts), I don't bookmark there. I bookmark fannishly most of the time, but I want to be able to put that reference material I'm saving for a fic I'm writing with my fic bookmarks. I want to have something that has the features fandom wants, but can be used for other things. For me copyright is a fannish issue, but I know that isn't true for everyone. I want to be able to put those bookmarks there, even if they aren't directly tied to fannish meta. I want to read other fans bookmarks on the issue because they have opinions I value, but they also understand my perspective. I want a place where fen can bookmark whatever, but still have things like linked chapters and series, public and private tags (not just bookmarks) etc. I want something for us and by us that we can use in multiple contexts. Or even open up to other users. Just, they aren't the target demographic. We are.
And I am willing to put time into coding something like this. Possibly a lot of time, since I don't do web programming and would have to learn more to be useful at it. The question is, does anyone else care? Would anyone else be willing to help? To use, even? That I don't know, but is one of the things I would like to ask.
Reaction Post Links
As I spent some time going through LJ and DW looking for opinions and if anyone else had found the next page option for tags OMG, I accumulated a bunch of links. I figured I might as well share them.
Oh my god Reaction of deliciouslymad community.
Well, fudge!
Delicious Mentions AO3 bookmark improvements that are coming.
Delicious fail Talks about what is still in progress and should have been completed before release.
Delicious Links to diigo and pinboard. Recommends moving.
Delicious Bookmarks have changed and I hate it. Her title sums up how I feel. I had to link to it.
NOOOOOO and More on the Delicious kerfuffle Someone moving and glad they backed up. I appreciate the rant. I really do.
Delicious fuckery and Diigo again Fandom group created on Diigo to reconnect people.
Delicious v/s Diigo v/s Pinboard As it says.
I have more links, but no time to put them together right now. (Or a spell check. I'm sorry.) So, that will be updated this evening.
Please, if you have comments on the issue, leave them. Also, please link to this post for interested parties.
Edit: 10:30 AM Wed. So many things to reply to! I didn't get home until 1AM last night and now I'm at work. I will reply and put up updates once I get a chance. That may not be until tonight. Thanks for all the enthusiasm and for pointing me to the /report. I just sent a message, so we'll see what is going on. ETA: 7PM Wed. Sorry for the delay. I'm poking at a bunch of things right now. I realized that I don't have time to round up links. Don't worry, things are happening. I will be making updates when there is something concrete. Fannish-delicious or the equivalent WILL happen, one way or another.