Yahoo! cuts! web! bookmarking! fat!
Three services? Too many. Two? Just right
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Yahoo! has cut off another useless appendage.
On Friday, the struggling ad broker told the world that MyWeb, its four-year-old web bookmarking service, will be severed on March 18.
That means Yahoo! will now offer only two bookmarking services: Yahoo! Bookmarks and Delicious.
"As we have continued to innovate with the 2.0 release of Delicious and the upgraded Yahoo! Bookmarks," Yahoo! said with a post to the official Yahoo! Search Blog, "we saw that MyWeb users’ needs are being served by our newer products."
This is true - except for the fact that Yahoo! Bookmarks and Delicious are not newer products. Both pre-date MyWeb's June 2005 debut.
But you could say that Delicious is newer to Yahoo! It was acquired by the the company in December 2005. And Yahoo! Bookmarks got a face-lift in 2006. If you care.
The few Yahooholigans who actually use MyWeb will find that their MyWeb bookmarks are already available on Yahoo! Bookmarks. But the transition to Delicious requires a bit more effort.
The difference between the two? Yahoo! Bookmarks is for private online bookmark storage. Delicious is for those narcissistic enough to share their bookmarks with the rest of the world, Web2.0rhea-style.
Since the arrival of new CEO Carol Bartz in January, Yahoo! has exhibited a new interest in removing at least a modicum of extraneous appendages. Over the past three weeks, the company murdered the ten-year-old Yahoo! Briefcase, a service that provides 50MB of online storage; Yahoo! Pets, an animal lovers' portal launched in 1999; and Yahoo! Ads for RSS, a beta service for injecting contextual ads into syndicated content.
In December, Yahoo! announced a 10 per cent headcount cut, which will see 1,500 people lose their jobs. And at the end of January, word leaked that the company had frozen the pay of all employees who remain on-board. ®
COMMENTS
Difference
>"The difference between the two? Yahoo! Bookmarks is for private online bookmark storage. Delicious is for those narcissistic enough to share their bookmarks with the rest of the world, Web2.0rhea-style."
...or, coming at it from a different angle, Yahoo Bookmarks has a predictably clunky interface whereas the relaunched/redesigned Delicious has improved on an already excellent service.
Admittedly, I rarely use the social/sharing elements of Delicious, but it's a powerful tool for various groups of users and I find that it functions brilliantly as combination of online bookmarking and edited highlights of my web history. If anyone finds the links I've saved to be useful, then so be it. And remember that you don't have to share at all - the option to keep all of your bookmarks personal and hidden is there, should you wish to enable it.
And it has managed to restrain itself admirably by not pretending to be a portal for the bored, or degenerating into a faddy "add me, add me" hive-mind "community" of "friends".
It's sense of purpose is self-evident and I see Delicious (along with Flickr) as one ofthe jewels in Yahoo's crown. Both those services are also a refreshing alternative to Google's rival offerings.
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