Yahoo MyWeb Redesigns & Adds New Tagging Features
Feeling the heat from YouTube, MySpace and even Google; Yahoo has recently been updating and expanding its Social Media offerings into more user friendly and integrated services within the Yahoo network. Last week we saw the launch of the new Yahoo Video with YouTube style video uploading, tagging and sharing. Yahoo also has the foundation of tagging & sharing under its belt in del.icio.us and Flickr.
Yahoo has now redesigned Yahoo MyWeb with a new design and features which add more user friendliness to the social bookmarking experience and hopefully will become a centerpiece of Yahoo social search.
New features include :
* “Top tags” and “interesting today” sections which work a bit like the del.icio.us Popular & Hotlist features
* Search across all public pages in the system
* Ability to export MyWeb bookmarks and pages to any browser format
Tom Chi notes on the Yahoo Search Blog that the most ‘significant shift’ in the new Yahoo MyWeb is not the new features but the adaptation of social bookmarking beyond the opinion leaders and techies of the web;
Perhaps the most significant shift in this release has less to do with any one feature, but is simply the realization that social bookmarking is catching on with people with very diverse passions and interests. While the list of popular tags still has entries like “CSS” and “XML”, the more Joshua, Stephen and I look through the data, the more it’s clear that these bookmarks are for Buddhists, and ambient music fans, and breakdancers.
What would I like to see more of in Yahoo MyWeb? Yahoo seems to be lacking a central start page to its social media offerings… sure, it can be argued that search is essentially their social core, but in my opinion since MyWeb is the base of Yahoo search tagging and sharing, making it a central location for the keeping up of tagging by friends and family in other Yahoo Social offerings like Yahoo Video and Flickr would bring MyWeb around full circle. Perhaps this is the plan for 360 or MyYahoo, once Yahoo tagging & bookmarking expands even further beyond the Liberal Arts university crowd (Buddhists, ambient music fans, and breakdancers) and into the Yahoo Answers ‘real world‘ 2.0 users.
