It’s been over nine months since Yahoo first gave us a glimpse of Delicious 2.0 – a complete code rewrite from the now aging platform that was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005.

Yahoo never said when they’d be ready to launch the new Delicious (it’s available at preview.delicious.com but beta invitations are locked down). In January there was a hint on the Delicious blog that the new version was coming soon: “We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious. We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.” But no update came, and since then, not a peep from Yahoo.

It’s now been nine months. We’ve heard from Yahoo insiders that founder Joshua Schachter is now working on another project, and now that his stock has fully vested it isn’t even certain he’ll stay with the company. Meanwhile, scaling issues have confounded the Delicious team and they continue to rework the architecture.

In April venture capitalist/blogger Fred Wilson noted that the user numbers for Delicious were dropping. Schachter told us that the Comscore numbers did not reflect their business, saying they continue to “grow normally.” He also pointed out that a large number of people use the service via Firefox and other browser plugins, and that the service shut off search indexing, hurting unique traffic numbers.

Delicious is still my social bookmarking service of choice, but Delicious 2.0 is a serious black eye for Yahoo and the Delicious team. It’s time for them to update us on when we can expect a general release of the next version.

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