Yahoo! is doing lots of interesting things. I'm not into 360 much but, given how Yahoo! is developing, I have registered and started an account. I have played with Y!Q ('Copy and paste text from your published content into the text box, or type in a query in English. Click on Y!Q Search and it does the rest, using the entered text as the context for an initial search and subsequent related searches), but need to try it and test it a lot more.
More interesting to me right now is My Web. It's extremely easy to use (I find it a much simpler UI and procedure than Furl, say). Advertised features:
Save what you like to build your own personal web
- Search and browse the web, as you do today
- Save an exact copy of any page you like - from Yahoo! Toolbar or directly from your search results
- Save thousands of pages - anything you may want later
"Re-find" pages instantly when you need them again
- Search My Web to find any of your saved pages
- Searching across full-text and your notes enables instant retrieval
- Turn on My Search History to quickly access past searches and visited results
Share your personal web
- Create categories for your saved pages - travel, projects, events
- Share your favorites with friends and colleagues - via email, IM, and RSS (Yahoo! 360° coming soon)
Better than bookmarks
- Save both an exact copy and a link - the content you save will always be there when you return
- Searchable - Organize as you wish, search for the rest
- Accessible anywhere, not just from your own computer
- Import your bookmarks to immediately experience the benefits of My Web
If I want to keep a copy of a webpage and access it anywhere, My Web is ideal. (I can't see myself going back to Onfolio.) Add the power of Yahoo! search …
Could this service displace del.icio.us for me? (There's a mulling over of this question here and SiliconBeat highlights the social nature of My Web searching.) I'm using both. My use of del.icio.us is now well-established but My Web 2.0 has made it possible for me to import my del.icio.us bookmarks. Caterina Fake, of Flickr fame, has written about My Web 2.0 here and there's a My Web blog, too — plenty to think about and follow. Vitally, though, del.icio.us allows you to export your data; My Web doesn't, as yet — see my last paragraph, below.
Then, of course, there's the Yahoo! purchase of Konfabulator, the possible implications of which for mobile online life have been noted. But the implications for the desktop market are great, too: 'Konfabulator, now part of the Yahoo empire, is a frontal assault on Microsoft desktop dominance. The future is web services, and Konfabulator provides VERY easy to develop desktop widget technology with a completely open API. … What sets Konfabulator apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today’s advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X ' (Cloudy Thinking).
At Open Tech, Jeremy Zawodny spoke about Yahoo!'s development and the huge growth in user-generated content, present and to come. They look forward to remixing data 'from various silos', with new apps and services allowing us to see information we couldn't see before. Jeff Weiner spoke along these lines at Supernova '05: FUSE — 'Enable people to Find, Use, Share and Expand all human knowledge'. Earlier this year, John Battelle spoke with Jeff Weiner and posted his reflections:
When you think about Yahoo's search mission as an organizing principle, a lot of what Yahoo is doing - 360, MyWeb, Y!Q, the purchase of Flickr - start(s) to fall into place … (they're) using search to fuse a myriad of services and applications, all of which center on knowledge and its application. As Jeff pointed out to me, at the center of the idea of FUSE is what's happening to media - how every single medium - music, TV, print, telecom, even our first versions of the web - is being remixed and reordered by Web 2.0. It's an old saw, but mass media really is becoming my media - through RSS, podcasting, iTunes, Tivo, blogs, and many innovations to come. And central to navigating a my media world is search. Hence, the FUSE vision holds water for me - search is not just about a web index. It's about my interface to the world.
I like both Google and Yahoo's visions, to be honest, they both augur a future where control lies with us, through the questions we ask and the tracks we leave across the ever expanding web. Yahoo's focus on sharing, I think, is critical, and perhaps a key area where Google's (stated) vision may be lacking at the moment. But with so many recent innovations in that space - search history, Gmail, increased RSS support, centralized account management - I don't expect that deficit to stand for long.
With 360, as with Web 2.0 in general, there's the problem of my/your data being locked up inside a proprietary web-service — see above (will My Web allow us to export our data?) and this O'Reilly Radar piece. Richard MacManus has timely thoughts about this, the so-called Walled Garden effect. It's going to be absolutely vital to Web 2.0 that the walls do, indeed, come down.
