Ten months after launching a preview version of its overhaul, social bookmarking tool, Delicious dropped the dots from its former del.icio.us moniker and released a faster and easier to learn version 2.0.
Delicious, which is owned by Yahoo, said that the new site - which went live Thursday - has been 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," Delicious said. "You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of five million users."
In addition, Delicious overhauled its search engine in an effort to make it faster and more powerful. The company noted that the engine "used to take ages to return results." The new search engine allows users to search with one of their tags, another user's bookmarks or within their social network.
Delicious also updated the site's user interface to improve usability, and added often-requested features like 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," the company said. "At the same time, we're hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.
The move to eliminate the dots in the URL aims to avoid the confusion and misspellings that came from the old moniker, the company went on to note. While the old domain and URL will continue to work, users have to log in again to the new site because it requires a new log-in cookie.
The social bookmarking site has grown from 300,000 to 5 million unique users since Yahoo acquired it late in 2005, the company said. It now boasts 150 million bookmarked links.
Delicious went on to say that new features should be added more quickly than the 10-month wait for this overhaul. Delicious hinted in a January blog post that they would have an update to a preview version that was released in September 2007 within weeks, but the company had been quiet about the new features until now.