I was reading Joyce's comments on MyWeb 2.0 last night and realized that I needed to write something about it, but I wasn't sure what. So I waited a bit.
Then it struck me a few minutes ago.
I think she understands MyWeb 2.0 more than some of the people who created the product. She's able to describe, in her own terms, exactly what MyWeb 2.0 is useful for and continues on to explain her problem with it:
One of the strangest things about MyWeb, and possibly the reason it hasn't caught the imagination yet, is that the three functions I mention above -- personal server-side bookmarking, social network-filtered linkstream, and human-powered search engine -- use what amounts to three different UIs, two of which are unattractive and/or hard to use.
She put her finger on something that's been bugging me for a while now, but I could never figure it out.
Posted by jzawodn at November 22, 2005 09:37 PM
If you look at new folksonomy services such as riffs, they are actually fun, with very good UI and functionality. I totally agree with all aboves comments, as I have 1700 delicious items and use it for all surfing classification, but it has weaknesses. Yahoo's MyWeb with people like caterina could really be something (hate the word) "kewl" - remember the pink of flickr... its what is needed for yahoo in this space. Good Luck. Nice post.
Yahoo also needs to open up MyWeb 2.0, to allow people to export their content. This may not matter to normal folk, but it's keeping all the alpha geeks away. MyWeb 2.0 needs the alpha geeks - open it up! :-)
I have a quite a love/hate relationship with MyWeb. Not only are the interfaces not cohesive, but the tools to drive the social network part are not connected. There is a possible steering wheel in 360 with grouping of friends, but it is not connected.
The social networking components are miserable and not mature. They must understand the relationships between those making bookmarks, those wanting to see those bookmarks, and the variance between these two points. I have no problem with people wanting to subscribe to my bookmarking and having them in my *community* (although the community needs to be more fine grained in its approach as what I share with one subset of my community may not be appropriate or even desired to be share with another subset (the geek, family, and toothpick collector groups are not synonymous). I may not want to subscribe to the bookmarks of those who want to subscribe to mine. I have bounced people from my community because I do not want the AOL frontpage, CNN frontpage, nor any other pedestrian page flooding my incoming links.
So we have to polar groups. Those subscribing to my links. I subscribe to somebody else's links. They do not need to correlate, I should have a choice.
We also have fuzzy in between variance. I want to subscribe to some of the bookmarks of somebody else, perhaps only certain tags, or all but certain tags. A simple opt-in solution with a few variables.
That should be easy to accomplish. And this is a beta and still listed as one of the experimental projects at Yahoo!, so why is it not iterating or more innovative?
I also would love to have some of my tags viewable from my mobile device, as the Yahoo! Travel Planner is insanely limited in what is in it. It is not available for use on my mobile (one would thing the terms travel and mobile would have a more direct correlation). I am heading to London to speak at Online Information Conference and all of the ancillary things I would love to do in London are not available on the Travel Planner, nor is it mobile ready. London is a very mobile ready city, but it is not a viable option sadly.
However, on the whole I love the direction Yahoo! is going, but I want it there faster and to be more innovative and driven. I see all of the pieces, but nothing is quite connected.
I'm still awaiting a Yahoo! API so I can write some code to automagically add URLs to MyWeb 2.0 from other sources.
