delicious Debuts Its New Look: A Few Periods Lighter And Still Sexy.

With all the ruckus last week surrounding eBoost Media, it's kind of nice to get back
down to normalcy...which for us here at eBoost Consulting doesn't mean much because we're always slightly-off-kilt. :) Homeostasis is different for everyone, I suppose...
(Note: BTW, I'll be posting to BoostStrapping soon about the reputation management strategy we went through, the lessons learned, and the checkpoints of our decision-making process.)
Caught this on Mashable earlier today. It's the new delicious.com! That's right folks, the site owned by the company that certainly doesn't fear punctuation (that is, Yahoo!) is going against the grain and defenestrating the periods in del.icio.us and making it "www.delicious.com". Why the change? For the obvious reason that you can surmise which is confusion surrounding the url. This way, it's easier for most to pick up and share with others.
The new delicious.com promises better speed, more powerful search capabilities, and a cleaner design. Judging by the "delicious the movie" clip, it will definitely meet all of those goals.
From a marketing perspective, the video is a tremendous tool to utilize when transitioning to a newer version of the same product, especially when the older version has been widely adopted in the first place. I find it cool that delicious the movie runs us through what's different from a task perspective. This way, it's simply for the user to make the connection from "this is the way I'm used to" to "ok, I can learn that quick".
From an operations perspective, I'd venture to say that that the video will preempt a lot of service related questions that will arise when the site is live. What R&D teams sometimes neglect to take into consideration is the expenditure of time that your service team puts in if expectations are not correctly set and/or introduced earlier in the process. For many companies, the cost is inordinate. A properly sequenced demo video, introduced pre-launch, will mitigate resource bleeding when the site goes live.
Check out the video and let us know what you think!
Thanks for cruising by,
-johnny
P.S. - Big ups to our friend Nathan Arnold who served on the engineering team at the new delicious. Great work!!!
Been using the new site several times today and its a big improvement! There was some talk in the blogosphere about this relaunch taking too long, my thoughts are thats its better longer and done right than launched too soon.
Posted by: Micha | July 31, 2008 at 09:52 PM
Agreed Micha. Had delicious unveiled incomplete iterations, it would have alienated its user base.
It's much more effective to launch when ready. Time spent on the learning curve is reduced that way.
-johnny
Posted by: Johnny Chan | August 01, 2008 at 04:03 PM