I just now noticed that del.icio.us redirects to delicious.com…
I personally always liked the .us url, I thought it was clever and unique. But, I can definitely see how it may confuse some users, and I know that I always had to spell it out for friends that weren’t familiar with the site. Yet, delicious.com used to redirect to del.icio.us, so the usability issue for type in traffic shouldn’t have been a big problem. Which would leave me at a branding debate, and I think this one is simply a matter of opinion. .com’s are obviously much more recognizable buy a much broader audience, but on the same note, delicious’s userbase tends to be pretty web savvy.
Sooo… wtf mate? Why did delicious make the switch to .com?
Thoughts?
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UPDATE: Apparently delicious made this change back in July with the 2.0 version, I just didn’t notice till now because my browser is still cached with del.icio.us! My question still stands though: wtf?
{ 3 comments }
I’m sure it was for type in traffic. Non web savvy user still think the only extension is .com. And truly, with the sub domain before the .us, remembering exactly where the . goes takes brain power!
I bet they payed a nice price for the delicious.com domain, I wish I had been the seller!
First off… “wtf mate?” When did you become British? I think I missed that memo.
Second, I noticed the change too and thought delicious.com should be redirected to del.icio.us (still) and not the other way around. I loved the uniqueness of it. If I didn’t know what it was already, “delicious.com” would sound like either a desert site or a porn site. I don’t think that’s what they were going for when the site was created – though I could be wrong.
yeah, i am sure they probably were tired of explaining to n00bs how extensions and sub domains work. they should have just redirected it the other way and promoted delicious.com.
the more popular (more valuable) social sites become, the more edge they loose.