Yahoo has unveiled a suite of new features for its popular social-bookmarking service Delicious, including a tie-in with the white-hot micro-blogging community Twitter to give it a more real-time flavor.
For a rapidly growing number of Web users, Twitter has become something akin to the pulse of the Web, where a list of trending topics tells you what people are buzzing about at any given moment.
With today’s upgrade, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) is porting that real-time acuity to Delicious.
The idea grew out of an app Yahoo architect Vik Singh developed earlier this year called TweetNews, which was a means of ranking Yahoo News stories by their popularity on Twitter.
“To freshen up Delicious.com, we developed a new, much improved, TweetNews-like system to aggregate and rank recently bookmarked links every minute or so,” Singh said in a blog post.
A new tab labeled “Fresh Bookmarks,” which replaces the old “Popular” tab, showcases links to the stories bookmarked in Delicious that are trending high on Twitter.
There’s also a new tool that enables users to e-mail or tweet links from the Delicious site, rather than the previous iteration, where stories could only be shared externally by cutting and pasting links.
Delicious boasts more than 6 million users and about 150 million unique links on its site.
Among the other bells and whistles Yahoo has introduced to Delicious is a multimedia feature that enables things like in-line playback for YouTube videos and Flickr to appear with the links on the site.
Delicious has also incorporated more sophisticated search features that enable users to set parameters by date range or to search by tag.
“Although we’re just getting started, we do hope this new homepage further demonstrates the freshness, newsworthiness and social relevance of Delicious — and maybe gives you a greater reason to come back to delicious.com more often,” Singh said.