A tip from Christen to see screenshots of the new del.icio.us interface (and I now see they’ve been referring occasionally to the relaunch on the del mailing list for a few months).

I don’t dislike it, but it doesn’t excite me much either. It looks incredibly generic, like every other Web 2.0 site on the planet, and the comments in the post make it sound like the tag cloud– which is the only useful tag view 99% of the time– will not be available on the main page, but only as a subpage. That’s just annoying…. I almost never need an ordered tag list.

Normally I don’t care about design changes… I read most sites in an RSS reader. But Del.icio.us (or, excuse me, delicious now that the new site is apparently going to be delicious.com), being a service, is different. Is it the Yahoo effect? Dumb down and level off? Or is it just a rule of the web universe that every site will slowly lose every bit of its idiosyncratic nature and uniqueness with time and popularity? Reverse-design entropy.

They keep telling us that the many many changes “coming soon now” will be made easier and come quicker with the redesign (which, according to Joshua and others on the mailing list, involves an extensive back-end redesign), but I’ve been hearing that since they moved to Yahoo. Stability and uptime have improved, granted, but a completely redesigned interface is nearing completion and we still don’t have even have a basic set of tag operators? If “the real value is the data and the API” as people are always proclaiming, why do those items come second to pretty fonts and tags that nest in pretty little arrows?