Have you ever wanted to find that one link you posted on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, but couldn’t seem to find it anywhere?! It’s frustrating. You might say "well, bookmark it!" And that’s good advice. But the thing is that we often think of that later. After reading an article, you might bookmark it, but you may also just share it to a social network.

Then later on you realize you wish you could find that link to show someone else or just to reread. You search Google, but don’t seem to be able to think of the right words to pull it up. You scan through your social network profiles, but you shared this weeks ago and it’s now buried under lots of other status updates and other links that you’ve shared.

So, how do you find it? Delicious.

A Bittersweet History

Delicious has been around for a while. It has long been known as the “social bookmarking site” and has really been the pioneer for many similar websites such as Xmarks, Evernote, Springpad, etc. It had started to plummet, but with its upgrade in user interface and services it is making a comeback.

Personally, I don’t see its advantage in importing browser bookmarks and saving all links to it — there are services such as Xmarks, which syncs (not just imports) your browser bookmarks to the cloud. And there is Evernote and Springpad which are amazing at clipping articles to read later.

But there is a feature that Delicious implemented earlier this year and has continued to improve and that is syncing links from your social networks. Along with syncing links you currently post to your social networks, it also imports past links that you’ve shared. Currently this works with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and can be accessed by going to your settings and then clicking on the Sources tab.

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Does this service ring a bell yet? What about whenever I mention Trunk.ly? The reason the services seem so similar is because Delicious actually acquired Trunk.ly and integrated their features within the Delicious service. Delicious has actually done away with “stacks” as well, which was covered on MakeUseOf. Instead, they have announced that you won’t lose those links, but they will be converted automatically into tags.

A Scrumptious Way To Archive & Search Tweets

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I came across the idea of searching for tweets while writing an article and trying to recall something I had tweeted in the past . I quickly realized that Twitter had no easy way of doing it. Delicious fills this void by importing up to 3,200 past tweets. It’s also smart enough to ignore any duplicates.

In addition, Delicious gives you the choice whether you want to save each link from Twitter going forward, if you want to save links only with the hashtag “#d” in the tweet, or to import all tweets but those with the hashtag “#d” in them. Favorited tweets and retweets can also be imported.

For all tweets that Delicious imports it appends a tag, which you can customize. By default the tag is “from Twitter.” You’re also able to add multiple accounts to import tweets from.

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Facebook has made it a tad bit easier to find things with the Timeline view, but it’s still not ideal. Delicious solves that problem by importing all posts with a link. The import process is very similar to how it handles Twitter. It creates a default, but customizable, tag called “from Facebook.

I really liked that Delicious allows you to adjust whether you want links imported to be public, private, or to remain the same as how they were displayed on Facebook. Also note that if a link isn’t labeled as “public” on Facebook, it will automatically be added as “private” on Delicious.

Also, like Twitter, you’re able to add multiple Facebook accounts. Importing from Facebook Pages doesn’t seem possible yet, but it sure would be a nice added feature for them to have.

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Save LinkedIn Posts — Just the Icing On Top

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Many links that I post to LinkedIn, I don’t share on Twitter or Facebook so this is a nice feature. Currently the only option for adding tweets is for them to be private or public.

I will be completely honest here, when trying to connect LinkedIn to Delicious, I never got a successful connection — it ended up in an error every time. Now, I didn’t see anything on the Delicious blog about LinkedIn being added either, so it could be that it’s not yet available… which in that case I find odd that it is even visible among Twitter and Facebook. But needless to say, it is. However, I predict that it will soon be functional.

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Conclusion

In closing, Delicious certainly has had its fair share of struggles in keeping its reputation and place within the social media spectrum, but this could be a feature that separates it from the rest. To my knowledge there isn’t much else out there that functions like this where you have an account and can access your imported links at any time. There is a website called SnapBird, which works great for discovering Twitter tweets (your own or other users) in real time. If you are looking for something such as that, I recommend you check that out.

Currently, Delicious doesn’t do real time importing. It claims that it can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 24 hours to import links. So obviously this isn’t a tool that you should rely to to have your links right away. But if there is something that you’ve posted in the past and want to quickly find it again, the tags allow you to quickly do so.

Have you stayed with Delicious through its changes or were one of the unfortunate ones who lost all their links? If you’ve left Delicious, will this feature cause you to reconsider using the service? What’s your opinion of how they’ve evolved and changed?