One of the more interesting parts of Delicious has always been its “popular bookmarks” section, a list of the links that have been bookmarked the most by users over a given time frame. But similar to Digg, which is also currently trying to reinvent itself, it can take a relatively long time for these links to bubble up, especially compared to services like Twitter and the link tracking tools built on top of it.

Today, Delicious is trying to combat this issue by integrating a number of Twitter-related features. With its new “Fresh Bookmarks” section on its homepage, Delicious doesn’t wait for a story to get a lot of bookmarks (typically more than 100 in the old version), but looks at other metrics including related links as well as tweet count. They’ve also included “Related Tweets” under each link, so you can see what people are saying about the bookmark. Delicious explains this in a bit more detail on their blog:

“On the previous delicious.com page (click the Popular tab), you typically found links that had ~100 bookmarks - so more authoritative resources as opposed to fresh news. Additionally, given that the most popular tag on delicious is ‘design’, you probably encountered headlines like ‘100+ Wordpress Themes’ on most days (in fact, I used to make bets on this). For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media. Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, “eats our own dogfood” by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs (as ~81% of tweets do not contain URLs).”

Using only this morning to go on, the service's new approach seems to be doing a fairly good job of finding the most important links; a story about form President Bill Clinton's visit to North Korea, which is clearly the most discussed news story of the day so far, takes the top slot. Two Mashable stories are also under "Fresh Bookmarks," so they must be doing something right :) Here's what the new homepage looks like:







Naturally, Delicious also wants its users to tweet more, which would conceivably add velocity to bookmarks on its new homepage and help it keep pace with other real-time link trackers. As part of that effort, the service now lets you tweet during the process of saving a bookmark.

This is certainly the direction that Delicious needs to move in if it wants to remain relevant – at least from the perspective of delivering timely stories and links to its users. It will always hold some utility as a bookmarking tool, but just how valuable that is in a world where you can search or tweet and typically find what you’re looking for in seconds will increasingly come into question.