New Yahoo Bookmarks? What's New About It?
Arrington posts totally deadpan and uncritically about Yahoo's new Bookmarks product, which really has no reason to live:
Until today, Yahoo Bookmarks (which is a separate product from del.icio.us and My Web) stored only the URL, title and comment for a particular bookmark. The new product caches all text on the page, stores a thumbnail view, and allows both categorization (folders) and tagging of each bookmark.[...]
The new product has been moved to the same platform as My Web, with the sharing and some other features stripped out for now (look for del.icio.us to also move to this platform in the near future, while keeping it’s unique look and feel).
In a briefing today, Yahoo said they may eventually begin integrating user Bookmarks directly into search results (they integrate My Web bookmarks in a very minimal way already). This could pose a competitive problem for new search startups like Wink, which already combine traditional search results with user-generated bookmarks.
The integration with search is an interesting slant, which is not in the current beta, at all, except for the minimal ability to search inside your bookmarks.
My biggest gripe is the social dimension. It is completely inadequate to consider email or IM transmittal of a bookmark "sharing". That's like saying sending a document as an email attachment is a good basis for collaborative work.
What is going on at Yahoo? This is the company that owns Del.icio.us? Yes, I am sure that they have a gazillion users of Yahoo bookmarks, and they are perhaps trying to gently move them in the direction of a better platform for managing bookmarks, but sheesh.
I can only hope that there is some plan to move toward a general platform of socialized sharing inside Yahooland, but whatever it is, I can't see it.
The advances they have made with the IM architecture -- a rich plug-in model, and the like -- are really compelling, but the company seems to be stopping short of an integration of its own stuff. I love Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Upcoming.org, but why do I have completely unintegrated buddylists in each? Why do these all have different models of sharing and visibility? Different profiles? No integration with Messenger?
It's enough to make my teeth itch.
Meanwhile, they roll out this really old school, not-particularly innovative bookmarks tool, where the biggest breakthrough is putting bookmarks into folders by dragging and dropping. Ok, ok, they added tags, but still...
Why can't a client app or widget handle my disparate buddylists? Yahoo solving the problem within all their columns is nice, but it doesn't solve the big problem that I have one contact whom is a "buddy" in many spaces. Solve that.
Make it easier for me to associate a contact in my address book to a "buddy". Is it so hard to map; contact+buddyid+current URL and show me who in my address book is a buddy for a given location.
Posted by: turph | October 25, 2006 at 07:39 AM
Hey Stowe, this is Tom Chi, product lead for MyWeb and Bookmarks over at Yahoo. I posted an explanation of where we're heading with all this on the following digg thread:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Yahoo_Bookmarks_Enters_21st_Century
Hope that answers some of your questions.
Posted by: Tom Chi | October 25, 2006 at 12:22 PM
I am surprised people put yahoo's bookmarks and services like delicious, side by side. Techcrunch sort of did and you do it here as well.
I keep my web email address in Yahoo!bookmarks (and I have it on my menu bar)
I keep an interesting blog post in delicious (and I find it again by tag searching)
Two different services for two different uses...
Posted by: Harry | October 26, 2006 at 02:55 AM