Time to Say Goodbye to Yahoo! MyWeb
Back in 2005, we launched Yahoo! MyWeb with the goal to help our users save valuable information they discover on the Web. As we have continued to innovate with the 2.0 release of Delicious and the upgraded Yahoo! Bookmarks, we saw that MyWeb users' needs are being served by our newer products.
Context & Ripple Effects
MyWeb was Yahoo's 2005 bet on letting users save and share what they found on the Web, refreshed a year later with a new look and more social features after Yahoo had bought social-bookmarking pioneer Delicious in late 2005 (the Del.icio.us acquisition). Four years on, Yahoo is retiring the product, arguing that Delicious 2.0 and an upgraded Yahoo! Bookmarks now cover what MyWeb users needed.
First-order effects
- Existing MyWeb users lose their current home for saved pages and must migrate their bookmarks to Delicious or the upgraded Yahoo! Bookmarks.
- Yahoo's social-saved-search portfolio shrinks from three overlapping products (MyWeb, Delicious, Bookmarks) toward two consolidated destinations.
Second-order effects
- Consolidation concentrates Yahoo's social bookmarking efforts and engineering resources behind the Delicious brand, which becomes the company's single flagship for saving and sharing web finds.
- Rival bookmarking and note-taking services gain a window to court displaced MyWeb users looking for a new place to store their libraries.
Third-order effects
- The move foreshadows the shutdown-driven product strategy that later dented trust in the brand — a pattern captured in TechCrunch's 2010 verdict on Yahoo killing consumer confidence.
- If the pattern holds, early-web community features get folded into fewer flagship properties, raising the stakes for any service that stores users' personal archives: lock-in becomes a liability when products are sunset.
The trend: This is one data point in the broader consolidation of mid-2000s social-web experiments into a handful of surviving platforms — and of large portals learning that sunsetting user-data products carries a lasting trust cost.