Yahoo! MyWeb

» see myweb.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

still, i had a delicious account in those years like most people with a feed reader did. myweb was the sibling product yahoo ran inside its own search division, launched in june 2005 as yahoo's own attempt at a social bookmarking layer. four months later yahoo bought delicious for what the press at the time put at around $15 to $30 million. by december 2005 the same company owned both a home-built bookmarking product and the leading independent one, in the same category, on the same team.

that arrangement lasted three and a half years. myweb sat behind a yahoo login and used the yahoo id graph for its social layer. bookmarks could be private or shared, either with a small contact list or fully public. tags were supported for search and folksonomy discovery. it looked a lot like delicious with a yahoo skin and a slightly different privacy model. nobody outside a niche of yahoo-account power users ever seemed to prefer it over delicious itself.

still, the announcement came in a small note in february '09. yahoo said myweb would close on 18 march 2009. the note pointed users to yahoo bookmarks (the non-social version) or to delicious if they wanted the social piece. the search engine land coverage at the time treated the whole thing as house-keeping. by then yahoo was already shedding the smaller products from the jerry yang restructuring push, and myweb was one of the ones that had never justified the internal duplication.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

myweb sat under myweb.yahoo.com behind a yahoo login. you could save a page with a description and optional tags. the sharing model let you pick between fully private and fully public, with a named-contact-list tier sitting in between. that was a slightly finer-grained privacy split than delicious offered at the time, which was its one real editorial choice. beyond that, the tag search and the contact-graph feed were the same shapes the rest of the category had settled on by 2006.

~ the internal duplication ~

the strategic reason for having both was never public. delicious came in with joshua schachter as its lead and kept its own team and roadmap under the yahoo umbrella, mostly running as an autonomous property. myweb sat with the yahoo search infrastructure people. for three years the company let both continue. by the 2008 wind-down window it made sense to pick one. delicious was picked and kept running under yahoo for another two years, until it was sold on to avos systems in april 2011 and started its own slow fade.

~ what got buried with it ~

the bookmarking category itself did not survive facebook's news feed and twitter's link sharing. myweb was one of the earliest of the wave to close. delicious was the last big one to hollow out, with the smaller ones like [[magnolia]] and [[faves-com]] falling in between. by 2012 the whole category was a memory. the read-later side of the same problem got picked up by pocket and instapaper. the share-with-friends side of it got picked up by twitter and the retweet button. myweb had not really shipped a hook that outlived the underlying category.

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