A couple of new things to play with this weekend… the new del.icio.us and Spinvox. <\/p>\n
I got an invite to the preview of del.icio.us v2<\/a>. I don’t know why I got one – could be entirely random, or maybe they wanted to include developers who have used their API<\/a> in the beta. <\/p>\n Whatever the reason, it’s been fun to have a play. One nice aspect of the beta is that it uses a different data source to the current del.icio.us<\/a>. They are treating it as a sandbox so you can create, edit and delete bookmarks without worrying about losing a collection that you might have been building up for years. In fact, I quite like the bulk edit features. I don’t think that I really understood the whole tagging thing back when I first started with del.icio.us, and have long thought about cleaning up some of my older bookmarks. With these new features, I might even get round to it. <\/p>\n Some of the new features seem a little odd – like the ability to define the public domain or Creative Commons license to use for your bookmarks RSS feed, similar to the way that you can with photos on flickr<\/a>. Letting you choose between public\/private is one thing, but choosing between all the different types of Creative Commons license (e.g. whether you require attribution, etc.) seems like a bit too much choice for a bunch of links. Can you really require someone to credit you for finding a website first? Still, I guess it doesn’t cost del.icio.us much to provide the feature, so why not? It seems to default to “All rights reserved”, which doesn’t seem to be in what I thought was the spirit of del.icio.us, but I guess that is the safest way to avoid controversy.<\/p>\n One more obvious change is that they same to be moving away from the del.icio.us domain, going for the more conventional delicious.com instead. A shame in a way, as I’ve kinda got used to the quirky name. <\/p>\n I don’t use many of the features on the current del.icio.us website – I use browser plugins<\/a> to save new bookmarks and RSS feeds<\/a> to find interesting bookmarks from friends, so most of the time I use del.icio.us I’m not even seeing the site anyway. That said, the new site does look quite slick, and an improvement on the current version. It doesn’t work too well with mobile browsers, but they have said that they are working on improved support for different browsers.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, they haven’t given beta testers any invites of our own to pass on. There are a ton of screenshots on the web<\/a> if you’re curious.<\/p>\n