It’s web address. Although, Delicious Social Bookmarks has had the delicious.com URL as long as I can remember (3yrs?), it’s only now retiring del.icio.us in favor of it.
There are many things to talk about with the long anticipated new delicious design, the one that stands out for me is them finally fixing this egregious usability issue.
Delicious’s own Britta Gustafson describes the issue well:
The shift from del.icio.us to delicious.com is a usability decision the dots are confusing for many people. Far too often, we’ve seen it spelled de.licio.us, del.icio.us.com, delicio.us, etc.
Maybe, Delicious’ competitor Ma.gnolia.com will also see the light. Their problem is probably worse, because they don’t break after the syllable. Web search for Mag.nolia and Mag.nolia.com and it’s clear that this issue with a trivial solution is worth solving.
Filed under too-smart-for-our-own-good.
Update: Video shows changes made in redesign.1 The domain name change is punctuated both at the beginning and the end:
9 Comments
YAY! It’s not just a usability issue — it’s a potential security issue. Throw up a spoof site on one of the misspelled domains and phish passwords all day long.
Guilty as charged.
We would have loved to have magnolia.com, but as it’s owned by Exxon Mobile we didn’t think it was worth the hassle and expenditure to try and secure it from them. The concept behind Ma.gnolia was very much born out of the movie Magnolia, and we loved the brand that had been created around it, so getting past the dot was something we felt was worthwhile. Would we make the same decision the second time around? Likely not, but seeing as we don’t have the resources of Yahoo! to buy expensive domains, we’re making do.
Haha Ma.tt! At a single syllable and 5 characters I think you might be OK, but I won’t be surprised if you haven’t lost some Google juice for not having ‘matt’ in the URL.
Thanks for the comment Todd!
If my memory serves me, Joshua Schachter got the delicious.com domain pre-Yahoo, but post VC
It’s a little beside the point.
Although, I enjoy the play, there are enough people that are new overwhelmed by computers and the internet, and having sat down with a lot of people one sore spot is getting to their favorite sites. Many people rely heavily on their bookmarks — thank goodness for your service (which I prefer) — and until it’s in their bookmarks a typo can mean they never get there. My conclusion is dots in domains are deadly
I bet there is a way to preserve your brand and to transition to a new domain without the cheak. go Google whacking again. magmarks.com is expiring and bidding is only at %59 dollars
> It’s a little beside the point.
Well, it still costs money to secure domains and I don’t think magnolia.com would come cheap. When we launched, and in our first year, we did, and that’s what makes me say we’d do it differently if we could do it over. We haven’t heard much if anything about changing the url for over a year, so I wonder about the imperative. Harmful? Yes. Deadly? Maybe. As far as Magmarks, it’s clearly a bargain but just doesn’t ring quite right. And that’s often what it’s about - does it feel right.
I do think you’re very right, that the dots are little more than friction for most people. For us it was a way to get the brand we wanted and experience has informed us on that decision. I agree with your conclusion, just not that it’s trivial to change.
usability is not the same as findability. it’s definitely an obstacle to name recognition, not so much to anyone who has an account.
OK, trivial is a little over the top, and way over the top if you have your heart set on magnolia.com. It still seems like an opportunity worth pursuing to reduce friction.
This will likely sound like arguing for a half-assed solution (though I say again we’d do it differently if we did it over), but we just don’t see this as a big problem. Plenty of folks find us, both web-savvy (more on this end of the spectrum) and some who are very new to web 2.0. We run into more issues getting the ideas across using only verified identities than trouble typing the url.
The breakup of a natural-language word into a domain name, or part of a domain name like our own, does create friction; I’d never argue that it doesn’t. At the same time, given that both delicious and Ma.gnolia have new people finding the services every day, it stands that most people are finding those sites by their linkage from elsewhere, like search results, a blog, stuff like that. I think it’s a nice to improve, but in a time when url bars remember every visited url, re-finding is easier that just recall from the wet-ware