San Francisco — Last week, the struggling Sunnyvale, California web portal disappointed the fans of MyWeb, announcing that its four-year-old web bookmarking service, will be discontinued from March 18. The company is now encouraging its users to continue using other Yahoo! bookmarking services instead.
A visit to the sites homepage will welcome users with the following message:
We are streamlining our bookmark services. As part of this effort Yahoo! will be shutting down MyWeb on March 18, 2009 and moving users to Yahoo! Bookmarks. Your MyWeb bookmarks are already available to you on Yahoo! Bookmarks. You can begin using this new service now or continue using MyWeb until the shutdown date.
This indicates that Yahoo! will now offer only two bookmarking services: Yahoo! Bookmarks and Delicious.
“As we have continued to innovate with the 2.0 release of Delicious and the upgraded Yahoo Bookmarks, we saw that MyWeb users’ needs are being served by our newer products,” the company said in a posting on its Yahoo Search Blog.
Yahoo! introduced the service in 2005, the same year that it launched the bookmarking service Delicious. In a blog post on their website, Yahoo! Stated that they acquired MyWeb to help “users save valuable information they discover on the Web.”
According to reports on CNet News, Yahoo! has been considering to de-emphasize the service since 2006, when it commenced offering switch-over services to Delicious and Yahoo! Bookmarks.
Yahoo announced the decision to terminate the service a few days ago along with three options for moving your bookmarks to other locations. Obviously, one is through Yahoo Bookmarks as mentioned above. Your bookmarks are already available there.
You can also use Delicious, the popular Yahoo-owned social bookmarking site. You can move your bookmarks there via a simple three-step process:
- Export your bookmarks
- Register for a Delicious Account
- Upload the XML file using the “manual import” option.
Or, you can just transfer your bookmarks using Yahoo’s export tools, which will provide an archive of them that is easily readable by third-party services and browsers. But the transition to Delicious requires a bit more effort.
The difference between the two? Yahoo! Bookmarks is for confidential online bookmark storage. Delicious is for those egotistic enough to share their bookmarks with the rest of the world, Web2.0rhea-style.
Since the appointment of new CEO Carol Bartz in January, Yahoo! has exhibited a new interest in removing at least a modicum of extraneous appendages. Over the past three weeks, the company strangled out the ten-year-old Yahoo! Briefcase, a service that provides 50MB of online storage; Yahoo! Pets, an animal lovers’ portal launched in 1999; and Yahoo! Ads for RSS, a beta service for injecting contextual ads into syndicated content.
The move is yet another setback for the search engine, which experienced a tumultuous year in 2008. In December, the company slashed 1,500 jobs and announced a 64 per cent drop in their third quarter profits before their CEO Jerry Yang resigned. And at the end of January, word leaked that the company had frozen the pay of all employees who remain on-board.