In his blog post entitled Yahoo Bookmarks Enters 21st Century Mike Arrington writes

Yahoo is unveiling an entirely new Bookmarks product this evening at new.bookmarks.yahoo.com - new interface, new back-end, the works. A screencast created by Yahoo developer Tom Chi is here which gives an excellent overview of the service (Chi also created the background music for the screencast). Compare that to the existing Bookmarks product (screenshot is here) and it’s clear how significant the overhaul is.

Yahoo Bookmarks, while invisible to most cutting edge web users, still claims around 20 million active users (compared to only 1 million for del.icio.us).

Until today, Yahoo Bookmarks (which is a separate product from del.icio.us and My Web) stored only the URL, title and comment for a particular bookmark. The new product caches all text on the page, stores a thumbnail view, and allows both categorization (folders) and tagging of each bookmark.

There are two things that I found striking about this announcement. The first is that Yahoo! has three bookmarking products; del.icio.us, My Web and Yahoo! Bookmarks. The second is that it looks like my shunning del.icio.us while continuing to use Yahoo! Bookmarks isn't so weird after all, there are twenty times more people using Yahoo's regular bookmarking service compared to its social bookmarking product.

At this rate it looks like del.icio.us is destined to be a niche service unless something radical is done such as merging Yahoo! Bookmarks and del.icio.us into a single service. Of course, given the user outcry when Netscape.com revamped to be more Digg-like, the folks at Yahoo! may not have the stomach for this.

Faint heart never won fair lady.