Yahoo just released a
major upgrade of their social bookmarks project,
Yahoo Bookmarks. I'm hooked on social bookmark sites like
del.icio.us,
Furl and
Simpy. I currently use Furl only because it saves a copy of the webpage for posterity; Simpy does as well, while del.icio.us does not.
Yahoo Bookmarks saves a copy of the webpage, along with a thumbnail image. As demonstrated in
this screencast, it has a slick new interface, built with the
Yahoo User Interface libraries.
A lot of "Web 2.0" seems to be about taking old ideas and giving them a fresh reinterpretation through javascript and css. While Yahoo Bookmarks doesn't introduce any groundbreaking features, the simple and powerful user interface leads to productivity gains (I've been using they Yahoo Mail Beta for a few weeks now and I love it!).
I'm also happy to see Yahoo included tags as well as folders. I usually ignore folders: it takes too much time to figure out where an item should live among a sea of folders, while sometimes items belong in multiple folders (or none at all). Instead, I like to jot down a few tags for an item, and then rely on the search engine to find the item later.
Its interesting that Yahoo Bookmarks has no connection to del.icio.us (which is owned by Yahoo). They went the same route of separation with Yahoo Photos and Flickr. Why build two separate platforms in the same company? The Bookmarks launch post states that Yahoo Bookmarks are for personal saving while del.li.cious is for social sharing. But what if I want to do both?
(I have 1300 links in Furl, I wonder if I should even try to import them over?)
Comments (3)
I agree about Yahoo's multiple-web2.0-personality disorder. They've also got the "My Web" thing, so that's three bookmarking tools that Yahoo runs. I think the issue is that if things like del.icio.us and Flickr were suddenly Yahoo-fied, original pre-Yahoo users would leave en masse.
As for the new Yahoo mail - it completely crashes my browser 100% of the time. And even if it didn't, there's nothing I've seen there that would pull me away from Gmail. :)