Yahoo! updates My Web with new look, more social features
Yahoo! has updated their del.icio.us-like My Web bookmarking service with a fresh new look (pleasantly devoid of the over-used web 2.0 pastel palette) and more social tools geared towards helping you find new contacts, as well as what they're bookmarking.
Context & Ripple Effects
The update slots into a deliberate Yahoo push into social software: seven months earlier the company bought del.icio.us outright, acquiring the leading standalone bookmarking service while still operating its own del.icio.us-style competitor, My Web. Rather than retiring either product, Yahoo has kept both alive — and this refresh shows it investing in the in-house clone.
The notable choice is where the new effort goes: not deeper tagging or better storage, but contact discovery — helping users find people and then see what those people bookmark. That frames My Web less as a utility for saving links and more as a social-graph play, which is exactly the asset Yahoo paid for when it absorbed del.icio.us.
First-order effects
- My Web now competes head-to-head with del.icio.us inside Yahoo's own portfolio, forcing the company to run two overlapping bookmarking products rather than consolidating users onto the one it acquired.
Second-order effects
- Standalone social-bookmarking rivals face a portal-backed competitor bundling friend-discovery into bookmarking, pushing them toward richer social features to differentiate beyond tag storage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — portals buying Web 2.0 startups and rebuilding their features in-house — social bookmarks become raw material for portal search and advertising, shifting value from independent services to whoever owns both the links and the audience.
The trend: Large portals are absorbing standalone social-web startups and re-creating their capabilities on their own platforms, turning user-generated signals like shared bookmarks into proprietary social-graph assets.