Caught In MyWeb 2.0
| Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 | --jr |
Here's one that just hasn't quite caught on for some reason. Chances are, you all know about del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site that lets you find stuff and save it to a central server. Admittedly, it's a very cool service and one that lots of folks use. In many ways, it's a lot like Flickr, since it's pretty much designed from the ground up to be a public sharing tool.
A far lesser known tool that is more aimed toward smaller groups sharing content is MyWeb2.0, and i'll admit that I'm more addicted to it than Del.icio.us. Not only does MyWeb provide tagging and bookmark storage, it also does a bunch of other things that other services don't.
1. It can cache a snapshot of the page you're saving.
That's VERY handy if you're going to a site that tends to change things often. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to share that snapshot yet, but that feature alone has been incredibly valuable to me in the past.
2. It's HEAVILY integrated into Yahoo!
Once you activate MyWeb 2.0, it shows up everywhere. Do a search and stuff you've marked previously shows up. Likewise, if you've got a group of contacts that tend to find really good stuff, those results show up too. It's also in the Toolbar and most of the various options.
3. It's painfully easy to use.
Probably explains why it's all over. Seriously, implementing MyWeb2 links are a piece of cake, and if you want your cake delivered to you on a silver platter, you can use things like the Publication Tools to do that for you too. Honest, getting the links out is as easy as putting them in. Heck, if you don't like using the default Javascript based badge, you can get an RSS feed of the bookmarks and manage things yourself, like I did with my personal blog.
4. It's better with friends.
Again, that's one of the wicked cool parts. You get to control what sort of additional links you want to see. I'm friends with a bunch of folks who are pretty web-technical, and I always find great data they've already found for most of what I need. It's like having your friends become your personal web surfing army.
It's funny, I tell folks about it and they understand. I spend a few minutes clicking around and showing them what it can do and it's like watching lightbulbs go off as they suddenly "get it".
About my only complaint is that it would be REALLY nice if there was a way to get the same sort of function out of del.icio.us so that folks didn't have to choose and I could tap into that set of community links too.
May 16th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
The search integration is what makes this most useful to me — much of my contact network is made up of fellow geeks, so almost every time I search for something geeky, one of them has already saved the answer into their My Web.