Yahoo owns two bookmark sites delicious and its in house product myweb. It is not very clear what Yahoo’s plans are for myweb. In terms of visibility delicious is clearly more popular (atleast with the bloggging community). But, some claims indicate that myweb has about 20 Million active users. According to some of the comments by Yahoo engineers, myweb is meant for personal bookmarks while delicious would remain a social bookmarking tool. However, speculations are that the two sites would be migrated into a single platform. This would be an interesting development to watch out for. An even greater value of the two sites would be if Yahoo can move closer to supporting social search by integrating tag information within organic search results.

I had been sitting on a large collection (almost a year) of ‘recent changes’ streams from a few social bookmark sites. I decided its time to dust it off the server. Here are two tag clouds, one from delicious and the other from myweb. It is interesting to see that compared to delicious myweb seems to have a concentration of a small subset of tags that are frequently used. Compare this to tag clouds for Bloglines folder names and furl.

Comparing some of the frequent tags across the two sites it is interesting to see differences in usage. Overall, there seems to be a common ‘tag vocabulary’ emerging even across the two sites. Multiword tag feature is supported by yahoo, but delicious users have learnt to work around this limitation. Interestingly, delicious might have a greater appeal with the Technology audience, judging by terms like OSX, photoshop, ruby, ubuntu etc.

However, after looking closely at the list of tags in myweb it seems that the site may still be plagued by spam. See terms like hair, real estate, acne etc which are in the top 150 tags. Comparing the two sites, it just seems to me like Yahoo is trying to support two products that are quite similar.

I feel that both delicious and myweb provide Yahoo with a clear advantage over everyone else in social bookmarks and social search space. I see the point of having a personal bookmark tool vs. a social bookmark tool, but does it need to be two separate sites?

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