I'm not sure if I just don't like change or whether I don't like some of the changes on the new-look MyWeb. Last night Yahoo! changed the look and feel of the application, making it much more social and probably more useful for the mainstream. But for me — and I've relied heavily on it as a content database — it's less "professional."
Here's how Yahoo! describes the changes.
Putting aside my gripes, the new changes bring MyWeb closer to the goal of differentiated "social search" that Yahoo! had when it launched the product almost two years ago. My sense is that the interface still needs to evolve but it's now a great deal more social, with the ability to more easily search and browse content/tags and connect to others on the system.
What must inevitably come, however, is the merger or substantial integration of 360, Answers and MyWeb. Yahoo! must figure out what the relationship of these sites/applications to one another is and how best to leverage the content being created and organized by users.
A new report from consulting firm Outsell (written up on MediaPost [reg. req'd]) shows Google gaining share but reflects increasing unease with the quality and relevance of organic search results. Humans are an antidote to machine and manipulated search and that's the opportunity for MyWeb as a search and content portal. Wikipedia has already proven a version of the model works.
If Yahoo! can pull off the promise of "social search" it will really have something valuable and, in some ways, the product represents, in an ironic way, the "next generation" of search — human editors building a knowledge base in a scalable fashion.
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Here's more from TechCrunch.
Screenwerk 