Delicious Becomes A Bit More Social Again, Adds Twitter And Facebook Logins

Social-LoginIt’s recently been very quiet around Delicious, the social bookmarking service Yahoo bought in 2005 and then sold to AVOS in 2011. Back then, the AVOS team said it was relaunching Delicious “back to beta,” but Delicious hasn’t made all that many waves since then, nor has it added all that many features to the relaunched service.

But after four months of slumber, the Delicious blog sprung into action today and launched a few new features that could make the site a bit more interesting for those of us who long ago abandoned social bookmarking for social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Indeed, today’s update is all about Twitter and Facebook: Delicious added the ability to log in with your credentials for those two social networks and connect. It’s now easier to use Delicious to automatically save all those links you share on Facebook and shared and favorited on Twitter directly on Delicious, too. Delicious acquired the link-saving startup Trunk.ly to power this feature in November 2011 and turned it on for Twitter last March and for Facebook in July.

Using Twitter and Facebook logins isn’t exactly innovative, but it does point toward a more social future for Delicious, especially in combination with the new “Friend Finder” tool that lets you friend and follow people you know on Twitter and Facebook.

The team also made other small improvements – the bookmarklet and site now load faster, for example, but the main feature Delicious power users will surely appreciate is that every link now includes a “first saver” attribution.

I’m not sure that any of this will really rescue Delicious from its current obscurity. Saving the links you share on social networks doesn’t exactly feel like the hot new thing, after all. It’s good to see a sign of life out of Delicious, however, and if Digg is still around and kicking, why shouldn’t del.icio.us be, too?

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