Sunday, December 04, 2005

How is Yahoo My Web 2.0 doing?

It's been several months since Yahoo My Web 2.0 launched. How is it doing now?

Yahoo My Web 2.0 was announced as a way to overcome the "limits of web search" using "social search". Yahoo My Web 2.0 allows tagging of bookmarked web pages (like del.icio.us) and throws in some nice search and social networking features.

At the time it launched, I criticized Yahoo My Web 2.0 as being too much work for too little gain and doubted it would get mainstream adoption. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch also was skeptical.

It's nearly six months later now, so let's go back and see how Yahoo My Web 2.0 is doing. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to get traffic numbers for the site, but Yahoo does post some metrics for My Web 2.0 on their home page. They say they have 407,819 pages and 99,800 tags.

This doesn't seem like a lot to me. "My Community" of 20 contacts has 2,821 saved pages and 1,411 tags. This would suggest that the entire community is only a couple orders of magnitude larger than my community. It seems that there may be just a few thousand people using Yahoo My Web 2.0.

What do you think? Are you using Yahoo My Web 2.0? If so, what do you like about it? If not, why not?

Update: Yahoo just acquired del.icio.us. My Web 2.0 was viewed by some as a del.icio.us knock-off. I wonder if Yahoo decided to build My Web 2.0 instead of buy del.icio.us 8-9 months ago, failed to get traction, and now are going ahead with the buy.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use it, and I like it. My main use of it is not as a social search tool, but as a treasure chest -- a place where I can store full text of web pages together with my personal notes.

I should, however, liked to have used My Web 2.0 as a social search tool as well. But I don't know anyone other than me with an yahoo account (I'm Norwegian, and Yahoo has virtually no market penetration here) so I don't bother friends to become members just so that I can satisfy my own curiosity.

Daniel X. O'Neil said...

Yahoo Web 2.0 kicks ass. I've always been stunned to see how few saved pages there are.

I use it as a research intranet at work, when I'm looking to solve a particular problem that people on my team will also need to know about, or when researching potnetial clients, etc.

I also have the "tresure chest" usage for it. I have del.icio.us and Furl, but the caching on Yahoo! is a deal closer for me.

Anonymous said...

Actually, my community has tons of people with tens of thousands of saved tages. MyWeb rocks!

Anonymous said...

I use it along with del.icio.us, mainly for the caching / full text search features. Every week or so, I'll import my del.icio.us feed into My Web 2.0.

Anonymous said...

Use it, love it, have gotten others to use it. This is the Google killer once
they make it simpler and intuitive enough for the layman.

Anonymous said...

I started using it a while back and eventually set it up as my default start page a few days ago.

Two things that I would love to see in My Web (or maybe I just haven't found out about them):

- Offering the option of inserting added domains into "search rolls", like they have over at Rollyo (which is powered by Yahoo anyway).
- Integrate a simple RSS reader or improve the one available over at My Yahoo, like making it possible to add more than one feed per "content box".

Cheers!

Anonymous said...

I've used MyWeb since the beginning and include it every time I do a search.

I'm amazed by how many great sites other people have bookmarked on it; I regularly go thru Everyone's Pages saving anything I find interesting.

My personal bookmark collection has grown from 500 to 2000 in just a few months..

I'm also glad it's not overwhelmed with millions of websites. I like to think that the people who use it save only websites that are worth saving.

delicious has millions of websites saved but doesnt that just muddy the water?

Anonymous said...

I have a few questions...
1) when will it be integrated with Yahoo 360?
2) Why doesn't it support RSS?