Service: Yahoo My Web 2.0

Launched: June 29, 2005

What is it?

MyWeb2.0 is a social search engine “that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web.” We’ve used and abused it for a day, and in our opinion it’s good - a bit like regular yahoo plus furl (profile).

It was launched today as an early beta version “for a limited number of users.” There could be a cutoff, so it’s a good idea to sign up soon if you want an early look (what a great marketing idea).

Once you sign up (you can use an existing yahoo account), you can do a number of things. If you want to bookmark web pages, we recommend downloading the yahoo toolbar, which will allow you to bookmark pages you are browsing. Otherwise, you can only bookmark pages found on normal Yahoo search. We don’t like toolbars very much because nearly half our screen is taken up with them, but if you want to use MyWeb2.0 it’s going to have to be a part of your life (and hey, maybe you already use the Yahoo toolbar).

When you bookmark a page a popup appears that allows you to enter meta-data on the site, including title, notes, tags, access controls and a “save page” option (again, all of this looks and feels very much like furl:

You can also invite friends (feel free to add us - archimedesventures@yahoo.com) (techcrunch was taken :-)), and see their bookmarked pages. The whole idea is that stuff that is relevant to your friends, could very well be relevant to you, too.

This is user tagging in action (see our profiles on Celebrity Flicker and Feedster for a discussion of the perils of this), but here you have real incentives (like delicious and furl) to do it properly - both to find stuff later and to share with your friends.

Yes, it is yet another service to add friends and go to the trouble of bookmarking sites, but it does have in inport option (including RSS feeds) (yeah!) to decrease the burden. I imported my personal delicious page RSS feed and it seemed to work reasonably well.

There’s a ton thats been written about this (see links below), so our recommendation is try read the reviews and try it out for yourself. Thanks, Yahoo, for launching this experiment in Web 2.0.

Screen Shots: