I have been using del.icio.us for several months, and let me tell you, I don't know what I would do without it.  What I like about this site, is that no matter what computer or browsers use, I can access all my bookmarks by just clicking a few links. 

Normally I use about five different browsers for my blogging activities.  Each one of them serves a different purpose.  Therefore, I needed a place in the cloud, where my favorite bookmarks are readily available.  That's where del.icio.us comes in handy.

To my pleasant surprise, Yahoo's Development Team made a marvelous job by revamping the Delicious website and changing the name of the place.  Notice that it's not del.icio.us anymore.  Now the spelling has been updated to Delicious.  I like the new name better.  It's a no brainier to spell it.

Yahoo has revamped Delicious, saying the site for storing, describing, and sharing Web site bookmarks is faster, easier to use, and has better search abilities.

The speedup comes from a new server system that's snappier and more reliable, Yahoo said on its Delicious blog on Thursday. "You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of 5 million users," the company said.

The older Delicious limited descriptions of bookmarks to 255 characters, a cap that gave some appeal to rivals such as Magnolia, but the new Delicious raises it to 1,000 characters.  Though Yahoo is working to unify its profiles, Delicious accounts are still separate from those at Flickr and Yahoo Mail.  Users will need to log into their accounts and get a new browser cookie.

Here's Yahoo's official word on the changes:

Speed: We've moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable...

Search: We've completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they're very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another user's public bookmarks, or your social network. Now it's easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we've updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we're hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.

Today Jerry Yang will meet with the enlarged new Yahoo Board of Directors where he could find stiff and angry faces.  After successfully fending off takeover attempts by Microsoft and billionaire Carl Icahn, Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang could face a new group of critics today: mom-and-pop shareholders.

One shareholder who won't attend is Carl Icahn. In a blog post Thursday morning, Icahn wrote: "It will not do shareholders or Yahoo any good to have the annual meeting turn into a media event for no purpose."

Icahn said he had met with Yang and board Chairman Roy Bostock and while he still disagrees with them on many points, he said, "I have great hope 'this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.' "

I hope everything ends well at the shareholder's meeting.  In my opinion, Jerry Yang has done a tremendous job at Yahoo in its takeover struggles with ubiquitous Microsoft.  There are so many things Yahoo can do to contribute to the development of Web 2.0.  The new Delicious 2.0  is a good example.  Good luck Jerry!

Editions, localizations (including Flock's latest translation to Japanese) and Automatic updates will be available in the next couple of days.  There will be a Flock 1.2.5 sometime in early to mid August to move Flock over from Youtube’s soon to be deprecated API.

For the uninitiated let me say that Flock functions like a standard browser most of the time, with a few added functions that gear it toward social networking. Primarily, there's the "My World" tab, which serves as an RSS reader and social aggregator, tracking recent changes made by users' friends and colleagues on social networks. When a user visits a website that is recognized by Flock, the software prompts her to add it to the "My World" section of the browser.

The browser keeps track of changes to each social network, such as whether friends have added new pictures to their account on the photo-sharing website Flickr. A powerful blogging tool is also included in Flock that connects to most major blogging services, allowing for easy publishing.

A central theme running through all the utilities in Flock is the ability to share information with friends. In order to facilitate this, Flock employs a clipboard system that allows users to drag images, files, and website links onto a clipboard, and then share them with their friends through any of their social sites and supported Web-mail sites.


You can download Flock 1.2.4 by clicking here.  Good Day!