You know, life would be a bit less crazy for me if we weren't trying to launch new stuff at work when I'm supposedly out on vacation. Thankfully, the world doesn't revolve my schedule.
Over on the Yahoo! Search blog you can read about My Web 2.0, our new "social search" product. When I was tring to figure out how to explain it to other folks, I came up with this. Luckily, I wrote it in advance and can post it while I'm not supposed to be working. :-)
I've been collecting links to interesting, useful, or funny stuff on the web for quite a while now. In the "old days" I would email them to friends of mine. But we all get too much email nowadays, so I just post them on my linkblog and let anyone subscribe.
That works great for friends, family, and the hundreds random strangers who want to see what I've recently discovered on-line. But it's a one-way process. There's no easy way for me to see what they have discovered. Most of 'em don't have linkblogs and really don't want to go down that road.
So what's the big deal?
Well, everyone I know is an expert... in something. If I have questions about electronics or radios, I'd ask my Dad. He's always looking at that stuff on-line. Astronomy and Astrophotography? My Uncle. Construction and remodeling? My brother in law. Real estate? A couple of my old college friends. The list goes on.
The point is that for most topics I might want to know more about, I already know someone that's smarter than me on the subject. I have my very own community of experts (we all do). I just need a way to tap into their accumulated experience.
My Web 2.0, the latest release of our My Web service might just be what they need. It gives *them* an easy way to bookmark, annotate, tag, and share sites they discover. And it gives *me* a way to get at their stuff. I can subscribe to an RSS feed of someone's newest bookmarks, or maybe just those sites they tag as "funny" or "real estate." I can search my entire community's bookmarks. Or I can just start tag surfing to see what turns up.
Best of all, when I'm search the web and run across a site that someone I know has already annotated, it's labeled as such.
Oh... And if I ever manage to find enough spare time, I can use the Web Services API to do even more.
Posted by jzawodn at June 28, 2005 10:21 PM
Ok now I fail to understand if this stuff is any different from del.icio.us, I guess they do pretty much the same thing, bookmark of links someone likes,tagging them and RSS feeds....
Can we summarize "My Web 2.0" as Yahoo's implementation of del.icio.us kinda stuff.
cheers,
Badrinath.V.S :-)
I've written a small review, including how this differs from del.icio.us
http://frenchfragfactory.net/ozh/archives/2005/06/29/yahoo-my-web-20-quick-review/
(seems I couldn't trackback here)
My first thought too upon reading this was “how does this differ from del.icio.us?” Thanks Ozh, that review was helpful. I guess I’m sticking with del.icio.us for now; it has the first mover advantage that everyone I know also uses it, while noone’s over on MW2.0 yet.
(Also, between a silly name and a stupid name, I prefer the silly one. :-) )
It’ll be interesting to see if and how well the services cross-polinate.
If the service is good I'll use it.
I've been using Yahoo for over 10 yrs and I rather have all my social services in one place.
Now, if they added a tab for blog search and separated blogs from web content in the results I'd be much happier.
;-)
Yeah, this is also veeeeeeeeeeery similar to Simpy - http://simpy.com/ ... kind of funny.
I tried mailing this to the address provided on the My Web 2.0 blog - and got an out-of-office reply! So now you get it Jeremy ;-)
Nice-looking application!
Now the FAQs say: “It’s up to you. You’re in control.”. Well the control I would like is to be able to dynamically access the tagging and community data, and create sets like “My Community’s Pages” based on community lists from elsewhere. I can see there’s a start in your API, but this could easily go much further. Nice little RESTful interfaces for select, insert and delete using a broad-domain format like RDF/XML (which can support tagging through the SKOS vocabulary, community through the FOAF vocabulary and of course RSS). Go beyond data import/export, simply *connect*.
they took away the rss feed of my bookmarks. It was in the first version but now is gone.
Aristotle,
Gr8 write up man, truly informative. I tried MW after reading you post and fully agree with all that you have said.
del.icio.us is much easier to use and much faster than MW although MW is more sophisticated. Hopefully yahoo will take the cue and make adding links easier and faster and provide more interesting features like importing bookmarks from mozilla/firefox or may be a html file.
What say Jeremy????
cheers,
Badrinath.V.S :-)
Badrinath: I think you meant Ozh’s writeup. I just posted a comment here…
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/import
You can import all you want from here.
I'm glad to see Y! decided to start using tags! I was really excited about My Web 1.0 until I realized tags were absent (I did send feedback). I subsequently tried Furl (furl.net), which is similar to both MW and del, and now I'm hooked on it.
Unfortunately, while I can export my Furled content in various formats, I don't seem to be able to import it (I tried XML and HTML) using MW2. MW2 seems to only want to let me import my Y! bookmarks, or my browser bookmarks, not an arbitrary "bookmarks" file. I'll probably send feedback about this.
I've been a longtime Yahoo fan, so I'll definitely try MW2!
I'm really about what this new product has to offer. And I'm sure that there are some uses for it that we haven't even imagined yet. It's great to see Yahoo! on the leading edge of search technology. Google has some serious competition these days. And that can only make for a better internet for us, the users.
BTW, Jeremy, I'm getting a 403 trying to trackback to this page.
this is a cool thing and somehting close to what I've been wishing for sense I stumbled on this web search subject a year ago.
Really though, I think its an interim step (or hope so)
The mavens you know really should get paid for their knowledge, not on a fee basis but based upon contextual advertising that might accompany their link aggregation.
If they are good and, say constrution and the web, they, perhaps coupled with an interface preparer, should be able to join a small gaggle of likeminded folks, should be able to put up a page with a custom ranked search box and make money on the associated search ads.
Google search on pages does this currently yet I don't think google has the custom search and revenue sharing linked.
With this yahoo product, it would be interesting if the links shared also provided some small revenue stream coming back to those updating their speciality...also making sure the maven in constructions links weren't overpowered by another member who put up lots of links but wasn't an expert would also be important.
similarly what if your maven didn't stay up to date on the links he was contributing?
The incentive of pay and specialty creating a merger of ideas between and "about.com" and a search engine, with api's wieghted by radio bar randking of a given person on given subjects..really could create something special though...a reference with millions of seperate editors making their own editorial choices
The real race now is to own the tags. Search will only evolve when the web has been marked up with meta-data (tags). So Yahoo is late behind delicious, but they have a richer tagging system. Delicious has huge first mover advantage. No one is going to want to enter tags in 2 places.
I'm surprised that Yahoo is not allowing import of Delicious tags. Now that would be powerful and devious.
BobW : import your del.icio.us links in MW as an rss feed (del.icio.us/rss/Yournick)
(This and other things to do with del.icio.us and MW here : http://frenchfragfactory.net/ozh/archives/2005/06/29/yahoo-my-web-20-quick-review/ )
I think MyWeb has potential, but need to use it more. I am a heavy URL ADDICT see my.delici.us/rjeffries
If I can leverage my links and links from other people I trust to get more relevant serach, how cool would that be? See my comments about MyWeb. http://blog.eronj.com/ (permalink is screwed up, sorry)
This ability to save and retrieve bookmarks from anywhere and share them with friends is cool. Integration with Yahoo! Toolbar is even cooler. I hope soon there will be way to add myweb.yahoo into my.yahoo. While we're on the subject of "my", since it is all about sharing, shouldn't we be seeing more of "our" instead?!
Very cool! By the way, get them working on that RSS.
If it returned good results, then I could embed it in my kbcafe search engine along-side del.icio.us and Technorati.
TagBulb (http://www.tagbulb.com) offers a better Tag Aggregation service. It has an ajax dashboard to search in various categories in sources.
This ability to save and retrieve bookmarks from anywhere and share them with friends is cool. Integration with Yahoo! Toolbar is even cooler. I hope soon there will be way to add myweb.yahoo into my.yahoo. While we're on the subject of "my", since it is all about sharing, shouldn't we be seeing more of "our" instead?!
