Yahoo today announced MyWeb 2.0, it's personal search engine. The first version had encouraged users to import all their bookmarks into MyWeb, but MyWeb 1.0 only had 1 level of folders. So importing my hierarchy of bookmark folders wasn't too appealing.
MyWeb 2.0 does away with the folders, and instead offers - you guessed it - tags. A few weeks ago I accepted an offer to be interviewed about my use of MyWeb, and I mentioned that being able to assign tags would be a big help. It seems that they followed my suggestion, though I'm sure I wasn't the only one to mention it.
With tags, MyWeb is much closer to del.icio.us, except for two important features:
First, MyWeb allows you to save a copy of the page. While I don't personally consider this an essential feature, it is useful when a site goes away or completely changes, and you just want to view it as it was when you saved it.
Second, del.icio.us assumes you want to share what you've found with everyone. This precludes it being used for collaboration behind a company firewall. MyWeb allows you, on a page-by-page basis, to define who can access the page. You have three choices: private (just you), community (your coworkers, maybe?) or everyone.
The community feature could certainly be used at the enterprise level behind a firewall. The only problem Yahoo faces with this is convincing people, either at the corporate or individual level, to come into the Yahoo fold.
MyWeb 2.0 is still obviously a beta product. For example, importing Yahoo bookmarks assigns the same tag to all: imported_bookmarks. If the user has defined a whole lot of folders, why not use the folder names as tags? Still, I think they're on the right track.
Categories: search, bookmarks, yahoo, tags
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