If you’ve been following this Six Pixels of Separation Blog, you know how fond I am of the online social network for bookmarks, del.icio.us (you can find my saved items here: delicious – Mitch Joel). If you’re a fan too, you’ll note that even with their sale to Yahoo! a few years back, little has changed in terms of design and interface… until now.

It’s no longer del.icio.us. Now, it’s delicious.com. It’s got a new look, feel and even some new functionality.

I don’t hide my love for Delicious either. Back in October of last year, I wrote this Blog posting, Why del.icio.us Is Becoming My Default Search Engine For Research, for the Canadian Marketing Blog where I said:

"del.icio.us is most powerful because the content that is being tagged and stored is stuff that individuals have chosen and flagged. A real human being. So, when I am looking to do market research on something like email open rates in the United States, and I see a report, Website, web page or article that someone has tagged, my feeling is that it must be of value (one of my favorite features of del.icio.us is that for each item you can see how many people have tagged that specific piece of content). That is respect.

Respect is a huge factor in deciding what content lives (or dies) to the individual (are you listening Marketers?). Knowing that a group of people have identified the same piece and tagged it for themselves, is a completely different search spirit."

Now, it’s new and improved. And, while it’s taking some time for me to get the flow (old habits die hard), I am really enjoying everything they’ve done.

And, according to the delicious blog, here’s another reason for the change:

"We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of ‘del.icio.us’ over the years (for example, ‘de.licio.us’, ‘del.icio.us.com’, and ‘del.licio.us’), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.  Of course the old del.icio.us domain and all its URLs will continue to work.  Also note that the domain change requires a new login cookie, which is why everyone has to log in again.

It has taken us a while to get here, and we really appreciate all the patience and support you’ve shown us. Now that our new platform is in place we expect to release new features more quickly. Please check out the new site and then head over to our new discussion forum to let us know what you think and what you’d like to see next.  We’ll be listening."

So, delicious.com is faster, has a more robust search engine behind it and a brand new look and feel. There’s only one question left: why on earth are you bookmarking pages in the "favourites" folder of your chosen Web browser over saving it, tagging it, sharing it and leaving it online?