Delicious makes drastic changes to its feature set. Scraps “stacks”, replaces with good ol’ tags.

As someone who saw Delicious’ stacks feature as its USP, I’m somewhat surprised at this. Delicious has decided to make  changes to its core feature set, the most significant being the removal of “stacks,” a feature which let its users collaboratively create collections of links.

Delicious will instead now revert back to its basic and original tagging feature, common to most social bookmarking sites on the web. The reason isn’t clear but a note in the announcement email suggests another product by its parent company, AVOS, will give us a clue.

“…given the upcoming launch of new products from Delicious’ parent company, AVOS, and our focus on simplifying the Delicious site, we realized the value of stacks is limited for our users moving forward.”

Your guess is as good as mine. The only upcoming product we’re aware of is a social magazine called Zeen.

For active Delicious stacks users, such as ourselves, a guide is available explaining exactly how to manage your links during the consolidation process. All stacks will be converted into tags with identical names. Delicious is also keen to point out that you will not lose any links in the process but “Stack-specific descriptions, categories, comments, link order, and stack followers will not be included as part of the migration.”

Other notable changes to Delicious include the addition of a Facebook Connector. Similar to its previously launched Twitter Connector, Facebook connector imports every link you share on Facebook. Neatly it also maintains privacy settings so if you’ve only shared with a certain group of friends on Facebook, it won’t be visible publicly on your Delicious profile.

Delicious relaunched in September 2011 after being purchased from Yahoo by AVOS, owned by YouTube’s Co-Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The social bookmarking site doesn’t seem to have made a resurgence despite a drastic overhaul of its look & feel, and its features – the most compelling being ‘stacks.’ Which brings me back to my first point, I’m somewhat surprised at this.

Image Credit / Antialiasfactory