Yahoo My Web 2.0
Dear Yahoo,
I would use your new My Web 2.0, which has some cool social network searching features, if only you didn’t make it so hard to re-build my social network on your site.
Perhaps, before trying new, fancy ideas, you could solve a problem that really bothers many people- the YASNS effect- wherein people keep releasing new social networking services, yet each is a data silo.
Here are some ways you could get started right now:
- You could look at my XFN data, that’s in my blogroll.
- You grab the foaf file from my tribe profile.
- You could scrape my Flickr account page. Wait, you own flickr now, so you have the data. Use it!
And while you’re at it, get my bookmarks from del.icio.us. I won’t re-enter them on your site.
June 29th, 2005 at 1:47 pm
Excellent point, Ryan. I joined the thing to try it out because Niall said it was hot stuff, but it took me 15 minutes to invite three contacts and bookmark four pages, while reinventing a bunch of tags. Meanwhile I’ve got tons of stuff on Flickr, Furl, my OS X Address Book, and delicious.
July 5th, 2005 at 11:46 pm
Isn’t it interesting that the only nexus point for all your social networking sites is… the browser? Hmm, if only there were a smarter browser. Damn.
;)
July 17th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
Oddly, I revisit this post.
One thing, you and I are really like beta testers. Probably less than 1% of surfers have used most of these social services (LinkedIn being a possible exception). I think Yahoo is basically saying to themselves that social services to this point are very beta and unused, so why not start afresh.
July 18th, 2005 at 12:44 am
Bud-
I know we’re beta testers, it says so on the website.
As a beta-tester, I wanted to give my feedback, which I did.
And my feedback was heard by at least one Yahoo employee. :)
July 26th, 2005 at 10:19 pm
i agree that we are not the target market but still, we are the early adopters, and if they dont make it easy for us, well then, we just wont bother telling anyone that its worth visiting. theres the rub.