It’s all about the networking
| Monday, July 17th, 2006 | --jr |
One of the things I like about MyWeb is that you can specify the group of people who's links you'd like to browse. Since I've got fairly geeky friends, it's a pretty good source of info.
That used to be something that del.icio.us didn't provide, but apparently that's changed.
If you're a hard-core (or soft-core) del.icio.us user, you now have the ability to add other del.icio.us users to your "network". To quote from the folks providing it:
Your network connects you to other del.icio.us users – friends, family, even new people you run across while exploring del.icio.us. You can add people to your network and keep track of their latest bookmarks right here. And when you save new bookmarks, you can share them with people in your network simply by clicking on a username.
And since it's del.icio.us, you can pretty much do anything with your network links as you can with your normal links (view them as RSS, filter on tags, etc.).
Heh, now, add page image caching and integrate your saved marks into search results and I might just switch from MyWeb...
July 18th, 2006 at 10:40 am
Is there a reason that Yahoo is maintaining the wall between del.icio.us and Myweb? Frankly, the page caching feature, alone, is enough to keep me happy with Myweb, but it seems like the proliferation rather than the consolidation of these bookmarking websites just makes things more confusing for the average user, who, in my experience, still doesn’t understand the need for social bookmarking sites.
Hey, here’s an idea that you can share with the folks in the Myweb department. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were an addition to the Yahoo Toolbar that allowed you to have a drop down menu displaying your links that have all been tagged with something like “toolbar”? I think that would be something that would get a lot of average users to start adopting Myweb as a useful tool. (Is there an opening for an Idea Man at Yahoo? I can’t program, but I’ve got a ton of ideas!)
July 18th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Heh, actually, there’s a thing called the Idea Factory here where folks can post ideas like that. (Sorry, no awards, although i might be able to send you a few gumballs.) I’ll pass your idea on to those guys.
As for the barrier between del.icio.us and MyWeb, I definitely agree, but then I also understand why it’s there. Basically, it’s one of those “hours in a day” problem. There just aren’t that many folks working on either product full time. I know that there’s some effort to consolidate, but it’s like merging two different cars you bought. In theory it’s possible, in practice, well, it probably won’t pass inspection.
Likewise we really don’t want to give up on either of them, since folks find them useful. Chances are, this may be like Flickr and Y!Photos. Flickr is more targeted toward folks showing off, where Y!Photos is more about sharing. Y!Photos is FAR more popular, but it’s stupid to shut down Flickr. It’s better to take the best ideas from both, while keeping the each audience happy (e.g. Y!Photos has an Organizer that is vagely reminicent of Flickr’s.)