Delicious

You might have noticed that popular bookmarking web 2.0 grandaddy del.icio.us has had a face lift (as well as selling out and buying a .com domain! splitter!). It looks pretty nice and to me looks like a deliberate step beyond the cliched web 2.0 style guide and into something quite nice and new.

It also struck me not only from their uber-simple logo but from the site itself that they're working on a similar kind of restricted pallette to orange. Exchange that blue for our orange and what have you got? Well, nothing like the orange website but still...

1. no gradients - just flat colour.
2. no borders - just a few thin dividers.

Maybe this is something of a new trend in the making? If so I'm liking it. There's something pleasing about the simplicity. In fact thinking on it a second I think that's what makes it so good. Delicious always had simplicity, it was almost their biggest asset. With this redesign what they seem to have done is retain that, and make it look good too!

Tres bien.

Twitter

There's lots of discussion about Twitter and many people don't see the point. I guess I'm kind of in their camp. I did jump on board as soon as I heard but then pretty much stopped again just as quickly. It just doesn't really fit into my life, and I don't have the network of people who are interested in me to that extent. The people I have connected to in Twitter are (I think) not so much friends as acquaintances who want their experience of Twitter to work and realise that for that to happen they need a network of people. And so on...

The point I think, and the reason that some people are actually excited is that Twitter goes out of it's way to conform to what many people have been saying a web 2.0 site should. It's simple and easy to use, it's all about user contributions and about networking of those. It's also got a satisfying dollop of mobile thrown in just for good measure. Most importantly though, it leaves it's doors wide wide open for the kind of re-purposing of the content by all and sundry. That's big for web 2.0.

My worry is that because it does all these things which are so obviously "a good thing", people are giving it the benefit of the doubt in terms of it's usefulness. Like it's being held aloft on a wave of good will. I think it's great that the ways of contributing are being pushed to become easier and easier for people - I just can't really think of many people I'd want that much detail about.