UPDATED 4/6/06 (see end of post)

My Web 2.0 is a fantastic tool for quickly and easily capturing web sites as you encounter them so you can just as easily relocate them and/or retrieve a cached (saved) version of the page (much more than just bookmarking). As an added benefit you can share these saved pages with "contacts" and they with you. You can also make your selections public so they can be shared with the world. The end result is a pool of pages of specific interest to you and your contacts which are easily searchable and retrievable using detailed descriptions and tagging.

The newest rollout adds new levels of control to My Web 2.0 which simplify and enhance the sharing opportunities while also introducing a new messaging system (think Y! 360 mail). According to a message sent from the My Web Team, "You can now add any My Web user as a contact without requiring them to accept your invitation. " "... just add them to your list of contacts. Once you add a contact, they'll receive a notification in our new messaging system."Also notable, "As part of this upgrade, changes made to your My Web contact list will no longer impact your 360 contact list, and vice versa."

In the past, others were either a contact or they weren't. Now you can segregate your contacts into labeled groups and assign your save bookmarks then to be individually shared with whatever groups you want. "The labels are named friends and family by default, but feel free to rename them whatever you like. To start you out, we've labeled all of your current My Web contacts as friends."

We already have the ability within Y! 360 to group our contacts and now again within My Web. The redundancy between Y! 360 and My Web is curious. At first glance it doesn't seem to hold a user benefit. Is it that My Web users are not Y 360 users? Maybe this contact management function needs to be separated from Y! 360 and set up as a stand alone property to provide sharing control for Y! Photos, Calendar, 360, My Web, etc. The same can be said for this new messaging system - also redundant.

At the time of this post, the rollout was still continuing and access to adding and changing contacts was not yet available. There may be some simple answers to my questions waiting there.

 - - - -

Updated 4/6/05

Quickly as I'm running off to a meeting...

In checking to see if non-Yahoo! users could access My Web (they can't) I sent an invite email to one of my non-Yahoo! email addresses. To my surprise, the email address my invite was sent from is "Joe@yahoo.com". Don't know where a reply to that will end up. Woof!

The ability to assign your contacts to labeled groups is limited to two groups, intially named "friends" and "family" but can be renamed.

The messaging feature is one-way from the My Web Team to the users. I initially thought it was more like Y! 360's two-way mail function. I'm not complaining. I'm all for communicating to users and pushing it directly onto the property in question is the most direct way.

More details at the My Web blog.