Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo bought it in 2005. But it’s weird now to even think about it as a social site, I get more of the utilitarian vibe from it these days. People still use it, but it’s more of a repository. Or, to put it another way, it’s where links go to die.

Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive. And that’s what Yahoo wants to tap into now, with another revamping of Delicious. And not surprisingly, this revamp is very Twitter-centric.

The biggest difference is that the main Delicious homepage is now an area called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Previously, the main page contained the most popular bookmarked pages on the site, but that is now relagated to the second tab. This redesign is all about freshness, which is to say real-time-ness. Delicious looks at and refreshes this list of links every minute or so based on what people are bookmarking and what they’re tweeting. This model, while flawed (I’ll get to that), does make the main page of Delicious more interesting.

“Design” is the most popular tag on Delicious, according to Yahoo, and that meant a “Popular Bookmarks” area that was dominated by things like “200+ Paper Brushes For Photoshop.” For some people, that is useful, but for at least just as many, those types of links are not useful in the least bit. The redesign is an effort to move away from that.

One problem I see with this Fresh Bookmarks area is that the tweets it uses in its equation, often don’t have anything to do with the content being linked to. Yahoo did this on purpose, noting that some 81% of tweets don’t contain URLs, and they still wanted to use data from the most amount of tweets to populate this area. So instead they use keywords in tweets, but this often results in tweets populated below the shared content that have absolutely nothing to do with it.

And on top of this new Fresh Bookmarks area, when you bookmark things, Delicious now allows you to also tweet your links out at the same time. This should be useful to people who want to save stuff for later, but also want to let others know about it. You can also easily email links to people, and send them to your Delicious contacts. This is all done through the bookmarklet.

And the search aspect of Delcious has been completely revamped as well, making it easier for power users to dig through things they’ve bookmarked in the past. The new search area also features rich content, so if someone shares a YouTube video, you can play it inline. The same is true with Flickr images.

All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Delicious has long just been about saving links and not about sharing them like many of the new, more versatile social sharing services out there. If Yahoo wanted to tie the product into Twitter, it should have done that months ago, to get ahead of the curve, rather than at the back of it.

The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious.

And on the bookmarking side of things, the trend seems to be towards simple. Mike likes a service called Pinboard, I’ve long been a fan of Instapaper. Both require less effort to use than Delicious, and are quicker.

But you don’t have to take our word for the downsides of this new Twitterification of Delicious, just listen to its founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google). He’s not even waiting for the embargo to lift on these new changes, he’s just ripping them left and right. First, he notes:

I can’t BELIEVE delicious delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own. sigh

But later he completely rips the new feature:

i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal.

Well, at least he likes the new search, I guess.

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This guest post was written by Leonard Speiser, a founder at Twables, an application platform for Twitter that launched earlier this year. Prior to founding Twables Leonard worked at Trinity Ventures as an EIR. Before that Leonard co-founded Bix, a website that enables anyone to create, enter or join a contest. Yahoo acquired the company in February of 2007 and Leonard took on the additional responsibility of running the Yahoo Groups business. Leonard has also previously worked at eBay and Intuit, and has founded two other companies.

It’s 11 p.m. on a Sunday night when I notice that Twitter founder @ev has just tweeted about FB140, our company Twables’ days-old service that helps you find your Facebook friends on Twitter. Since our launch, I’ve felt like a surfer, waiting for a wave of users to start using our service. A few smaller waves have trickled through in our first days since launch, but Ev’s post represents something totally different. I mean, here’s someone who has more than a million followers and receives personal messages from Lance Armstrong.

I was beyond excitement until I realized a tweet from @ev has the force of nuclear explosion. And a nuclear explosion makes a very, very big wave. I quickly IM’d my only developer to warn him. Then I ran a Twitter search on Ev’s tweet and saw that it was getting retweeted. A lot. Between midnight and 6 a.m. alone, 170 people had retweeted him. “Frak,” I thought, “we might not scale.” For the next six hours, my developer began spinning up machines on Amazon, reworking our code and rolling it out overnight as we tried to ride the wave without having it crash down upon us. By then, we were doing more traffic in an hour than we had all week. Fortunately, he’s a killer Java programmer, and we’ve stayed afloat so far. By 6 a.m., exhausted, I reflected on three things I’ve learned since stumbling into development on the Twitter platform just two months ago.

1. Business hours are dead. 24/7 is the new 9 to 5. Real-time messaging means that anyone can start talking about your product at any time and that talk can snowball before you know it. I happened to see Ev’s post nine minutes after he sent it, but what if I hadn’t checked Twitter at all? Our site would have been down and a golden opportunity missed. As much as I love all the new technology (Amazon Web Services, Twitter APIs, Google Apps) that makes it possible for a two-person company to operate, it’s tough, if not impossible, for two people to be on call at all times. Perhaps this means that business guys like me are going to have to start wearing ops pagers (what? business people actually earning their paycheck?). How can you sleep for fear that someone will say something to tens of thousands of people that you really need to respond to. Is our only solution to never go to sleep?

2. The Borg has finally arrived. On Friday afternoon, I popped my head into Dave McClure’s office to shoot the breeze and mentioned a thought that Twitter was a bigger threat to MySpace than to Facebook. Before the words were out of my mouth, he had tweeted it, Dave-style. Instantly, people started to respond with their thoughts, and I realized that Dave was crowdsourcing our discussion before he’d even formed his own opinion. Will we all use the real-time world to have conversations? While Dave has the unfair advantage of a lot of followers, most of you are just at the beginning of your Twitter experience. I predict that you’ll join the Borg soon enough. The reality is that many of you are accustomed to asking those around you for advice. The difference is that now you’ll be able to accomplish your information-gathering process in minutes instead of weeks. Our company gets advice from users within hours of our initial launch and we are able to release changes for those users on the same day. If the dialogue with customers is now real-time, then the process of incorporating feedback needs to be real-time, too. Sorry big companies, life is about to suck for you!

3. The Patriot Act can’t hold a candle to Citizen Paparazzi. An hour before Ev’s post, I was talking to two friends about Twitter. They mentioned that a friend of theirs had tweeted about their two-year-old son a few times, which they characterized as an “unusual” experience. Celebrities will finally have their revenge as two out of every three of your neighbors starts tweeting about everything you’re doing. The Supreme Court will have to revisit the definition of “reasonable expectation of privacy” when a father’s kid tweets that daddy is reading Playboy in the bathroom. (That happened to a buddy of mine. Not to me. A buddy of mine.) This may not seem like a new phenomenon, what with YouTube videos and the like already starting this trend. However, the pace at which things spread is now so close to real-time that it almost erases the line between past and present. Real-time communication invites the world to experience your life with you, as it happens.

I don’t know if the world after Twitter will be better or worse. (For me, I think it will be better.) But when your tidal wave approaches, will you be ready to ride it?

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If you notice this morning that your follower count on Twitter dropped dramatically, don’t be alarmed. It is just Twitter cracking down on spam accounts and bots that automatically follow people. So chances are those weren’t real people anyway.

The drop is a big topic on Twiitter (search for “spam”). This isn’t the first time Twitter has purged spam accounts. What is alarming, however, is that some people affected are complaining that not only did their follower count drop, but that all of their followers and people they followed were wiped out. Oops. That is the same effectively as starting from scratch.

Spam accounts on Twitter are becoming a big problem, inflating follower counts and setting the stage for unwanted commercial come-ons and scams. (And you thought spam on Gmail was bad). As Twitter inches towards becoming a place to do business, it needs to sweep the spammers out of its system. Inevitably, some innocent bystanders will suffer collateral damage.

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