Yahoo's MyWeb Gets an Upgrade

Posted on June 19, 2006

Yahoo has improved their MyWeb social search tool. The B2Day blog has an interview with Yahoo MyWeb product manager Tom Chi. The interview lists some of the improvements Chi wants to make.

He wants to make shared bookmarks, tagging, and social search more mainstream by simplifying the service and offering more entry points for the average user. For instance, now you can search all publicly bookmarked pages instead of just your contacts' pages. MyWeb will be more open than it has been. You will be able to export your bookmarks to any browser (or import them, as well as from del.icio.us). There is a tag cloud with the most popular tags, as well as an "Interesting Today" feature (akin to Flickr's "Interestingness" sorter) that ranks links by how interesting they are to MyWeb users (as measured by how many times a particular link has been saved over the past 24 hours). The site will have more Ajax hooks (like all of Yahoo these days). It also will identify the most active taggers for any given term and let you add those people as contacts. So you will be able to find experts and, in effect, subscribe to their public attention streams without actually knowing them.

There are many social bookmarking and tagging sites these days so the tools that people coming back to will have to be feature rich. It sounds like Yahoo is moving MyWeb in the right direction by offering more and more features. The most difficult part for any successful link sharing or memedigger type of tool will be filtering out spam.