In his Yahoo! Analyst Day presentation , Yahoo! CEO, Terry Semel , showed this possible new and improved look for the Yahoo! My Web 2.0 pages.

My Web 2.0 is a fantastic tool for quickly and easily capturing web sites as you encounter them so you can just as easily relocate them and/or retrieve a cached (saved) version of the page (much more than just bookmarking). As an added benefit you can share these saved pages with "contacts" and they with you. You can also make your selections public so they can be shared with the world. The end result is a pool of pages of specific interest to you and your contacts which are easily searchable and retrievable using detailed descriptions and tagging. The newest rollout adds new levels of control to My Web 2.0 which simplify and enhance the sharing opportunities while also introducing a new messaging system (think Y! 360 mail). According to a message sent from the My Web Team, "You can now add any My Web user as a contact without requiring them to accept your invitation. " "... just add them to your list of contacts. Once you add a contact, they'll receive a notification in our new messaging system." Also notable, "As part of this upgrade, changes made to your My Web contact list will no longer impact your 360 contact list, and vice versa." In the past, others were either a contact or they weren't. Now you can segregate your contacts into labeled groups and assign your save bookmarks then to be individually shared with whatever groups you want. "The labels are named friends and family by default, but feel free to rename them whatever you like. To start you out, we've labeled all of your current My Web contacts as friends." We already have the ability within Y! 360 to group our contacts and now again within My Web. The redundancy between Y! 360 and My Web is curious. At first glance it doesn't seem to hold a user benefit. Is it that My Web users are not Y 360 users? Maybe this contact management function needs to be separated from Y! 360 and set up as a stand alone property to provide sharing control for Y! Photos, Calendar, 360, My Web, etc. The same can be said for this new messaging system - also redundant. At the time of this post, the rollout was still continuing and access to adding and changing contacts was not yet available. There may be some simple answers to my questions waiting there. Permalink     Email this     Linking Blogs     Comments

The Firefox and IE versions of the Yahoo! Toolbar have recently received updating . The IE toolbar still has tabbed capabilities and this extends to both IE5 and IE6 versions. This is not anywhere near the smooth tabbed interface of Firefox but certainly better than no tabs at all.   Okay after typing that I tried the newest version of the IE Toolbar and I'm impressed. The tabbing behavior is quick and uneventful. No jitters. Nice! According to the YSearchblog post , in the Firefox implementation bookmarks, mail alert and Anti Spy have been worked on but I can't see any functional changes. Can you? Maybe efficiency improvements or bug fixes? The most visible change is the addition of a del.icio.us button for both Firefox and IE toolbars. I came into social bookmarks with My Web 2.0 and really like it. But I like it as a personal depository of saved and searchable sites. del.icio.us to me seems to be very similar and only recently can you keep your saved pages private. I've looked at del.icio.us and it seems to offer less than My Web 2.0 for my purposes. The new del.icio.us toolbar button has a great feature that is sadly missing from the My Web 2.0 button; if you highlight text on the page prior to clicking the "Save to del.icio.us" button, the highlighted text gets copied into the Notes field. This functionality is in several bookmarklets but it noticeably absent from the My Web toolbar button. The tabbing in IE is pretty nice. I'm going to have to switch to IE for a couple days and see what it's like to have the Yahoo! Toolbar and a tabbed interface within IE. Permalink     Email this     Linking Blogs     Comments