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Delicious has unveiled some new feature enhancements to the homepage, including a new system to aggregate and rank recently bookmarked links every minute. This feature can be found under the new and default Fresh tab.

"Way back in January I released a simple application called TweetNews, which essentially ranks the latest Yahoo! News articles by their number of related Twitter messages to determine relevance for really fresh content," recalls Yahoo Architect Vik Singh. "Remarkably, the community responded to it – taking out the server quota in a matter of minutes and resulting in a Wired article saying TweetNews “might well be the best mashup we’ve ever seen.” So, we thought about where else we could apply this model, and in short order selected a Yahoo! property that we felt could benefit greatly from a social-freshness lift: the delicious homepage."

On the old delicious homepage, links typically ad about a hundred bookmarks. This meant less prominence for fresh news.

"For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media," explains Singh. "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). Try clicking the ‘x Related Tweets’ link for any given story to see the Twitter conversation appear instantly inline."

In addition to the new homepage, Delicious has some new search tools, which let you filter by tags and timeframes, and see historical save trends of bookmarks. They apparently plan to go into more detail about this in a future blog post. 

Delicious is also highlighting a new Firefox extension, which lets you email and tweet without ever leaving the Save form.

When it comes to social media, about 33 percent of consumers are not connecting with brands on social networks, according to a new report by interactive marketing firm Razorfish.

For the report, Razorfish surveyed 1,000 consumers who reported both social media and ecommerce activity with the goal to find out how social media influences purchasing decisions. Overall, 80 percent were members of at least one social network and 40 percent were active in two.

“Social media has quickly become one of the most talked-about topics in marketing. We didn’t want this report to just be more of the same, so instead we took a different, more scientific approach to evaluating this phenomena and measuring its effects,” said Shiv Singh, VP and Global Social Media Lead at Razorfish.

“Today, a brand’s actions speak louder than its words and pushing out messages is no longer enough to excite and engage consumers.”

The report indicates brands must identify who influences perception including offline peers, blogs and reviews. Consumers are more likely to engage with brands with credible voices. Brands using social media need to be personal and authentic and stay away from sounding like an advertisement.

Brands who provide value to consumers gain customer loyalty. Of those surveyed, 57 percent said they visited brand fan pages at least every few weeks or months, indicating consumers are not forgetting about them. If a brand provides current, relevant content, consumers will be more likely to engage with it.