Social Bookmarking Showdown: MyWeb vs. del.icio.us
What social bookmarking service should I use? I had originally started with del.icio.us, but when I started working at Yahoo! I decided to start using MyWeb2.0 beta, as part of the “eat your own dog food” philosophy. In doing so, I discovered I actually liked MyWeb quite a bit, and it had unique features that del.icio.us couldn’t match.
But since Yahoo! recently acquired del.icio.us, we now own two social bookmarking services, so I figured it was time to re-evaluate del.icio.us and see which one is currently best suited my needs for social bookmarking.
The results of my comparison were as follows:
| Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 | del.icio.us | winner |
| Privacy settings allow you to have private and community-only bookmarks. This has proven to be very useful for me in sharing with specific groups of people. | All bookmarks are public, making del.icio.us inappropriate for a complete bookmark replacement (unless you are an exhibitionist!) |  |
| Firefox extension via Yahoo! Toolbar is pretty lame, supports basic bookmarking but no contextual notes. | Firefox extension is more functional (supports contextual notes via highlighting) and better integrated (doesn’t use up an entire toolbar row). | 
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| Community features integrate with 360°’s existing social network, so that I see what my friends are bookmarking, which is incredibly cool. |
If you manually tag stuff for:username, they may or may not see it… |
|
| Integrates with and affects web search, so I get better and more trusted search results. This is actually really effective and super neato. | No search integration. | |
| Pages are automatically cached, in case the original source disapears later. | Nope. | |
| Web site is hideously ugly and hard to navigate. | Web site is hideously ugly and hard to navigate. | Tie |
| User’s home URL is an attrocious 70 characters of gobbledygook that requires serious reverse engineering to locate. | http://del.icio.us/mroth | |
| Stupid name that is completely unmemorable. | Even stupider name that is nearly impossible to type correctly. | Tie |
My conclusion for the time being was to stick with MyWeb, although I’m somewhat disappointed. I really wish the two features that del.icio.us won on (decent URLs and a good Firefox extension) will be integrated into MyWeb soon, since that seems easier than integrating all the complex MyWeb Yahoo integration stuff into del.icio.us. Or perhaps I can somehow hack the del.icio.us Firefox extension to post to MyWeb instead?
Pat wrote:
Myweb is nice but I find it a little clunky to use. Delicious is nice enough but I hate the interface with a passion, it isn’t intuitive in the least.
Needless to say I’m just not ready for WEB TWO POINT OH
Posted 07 Jan 2006 at 12:59 pm ¶
Brent wrote:
If del.icio.us allowed users to save cached pages, then it would be great. Myweb wins because of this. I don’t know how else I could catch bloggers in ridiculous lies otherwise (like when they censor things because it will expose them as frauds).
Myweb needs a Firefox extension similar to the one for del.icio.us. Simple tagging with descriptions and a couple of options for tagging and caching with a nice popup is all I ask for.
Why hasn’t Yahoo just combined the two into one service called my delicious web?
;)
Posted 27 Jan 2007 at 9:01 pm ¶