Social networking site del.icio.us has decided to make their service a little more, well, social. They've now added a "your network" section, which essentially is just all the user subscriptions that used to be in your inbox and put them in a section all by themselves.
This can be seen as both a good and a bad thing: It is good because it gives you a place exclusively for you to see what your contacts have been bookmarking, like Digg's friends page. For some people, that may be all they want, which is good... for them.
However, there are some people, myself included, who would be a bit irritated about this change, considering the fact that they now have to go to two seperate places to view their subscriptions. I myself for one was perfectly content with all my subscriptions aggregated together into one happy lump of bookmarks. I mean, they don't even give you an option to go back to the old way. They must keep in mind that not everyone adapts as easily to change as others. Forcing them to use the network inbox in addition to the standard inbox is just not right. Say you had a dozen email addresses. Would you use check each of your dozen email addresses invidually or would you set them up so they would forward incoming mail to the one you use the most? This is essentially the same thing. Allowing users to kill two birds with one stone both saves their time and minimizes the number of clicks the user has to make to get where they want to be.
I'm not bashing del.icio.us' network functionality, I think it's great. Splitting them up even made it easier for me to figure out how I was going to implement the Greasemonkey script I'm working on. But the main point here is, when introducing something new that everyone might not react to positively, make sure to have a way to let the user to back to the way it used to be.
Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, usability, greasemonkey
