We wish we’d had more time to play with this, but news is breaking out all over this week, and we’ve been busy. That said, Yahoo is unveiling the next iteration of its My Web product tonight. Version one was mostly about storing bookmarks and whatnot. Version 2.0 is about sharing that information with others. Yahoo calls it a “social search engine” and says the product strongly embraces the concept of tagging. (See a screenshot here.)
In Yahoo’s words: “My Web 2.0 beta is a social search product that enables users to create their own personal, searchable trusted web and share their favorite web pages with their community.”
Essentially, MyWeb is a web space where users can stash information about web pages that interest them. They can annotate and add tags, explaining what they liked about them. Users can then create a social circle of friends, family and/or co-workers and allow them to search their stash of web pages. Users control their social circles through My 360, Yahoo’s new social networking service.
“Social search is all about searching the knowledge that your friends have, versus the knowledge the world has,” Eckart Walther, Yahoo Search vice president of product management told us during a demo Wednesday. “It’s about tapping into your friends’ expertise.”
“It’s really the first personal search engine out there,” he added. “It uses the network and communities so that communities can get together and build the search experience. In our minds, it’s really the next big step.”
Walther said the concept can be extended into existing networks, such as Yahoo Groups.
Users can watch information from their social circles flow into their My Web pages as others find, annotate and store web pages. And they can use RSS to filter the type of information they want to see.
“It turns the Internet active for me,” Walther said. “Now my friends are becoming the filter for the Internet.”
Yahoo worked closely with Flickr, the company it acquired earlier this year, on the product. In fact, it broke news of the product on the Flickr blog.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings.
