Friday 15 December 2006

Yoono Community

Yoono, is a new generation search engine. Most search engines return ton of pages whose only the first dozen is read. How can we be sure that they are the best results? How can we quickly find what we’re looking for without consulting too many web sites? How can we find who is referencing the pages? As we all know, nowadays the search engines index keywords in web pages. To produce the results, they automatically classify the pages by a clever calculation known as the page ranking. This comes from weighing a number of links pointing to and pointed from a page. The real popularity of a web site its audience could not necessarily be taken into account.


Yoono's founders claim they wish to get back to the initial spirit of the web, and allow individuals to exchange important information quickly and freely. Yoono is a new idea of social or collaborative software, it frees the user from constraints of language and synonyms, by reusing existing data and maintaining users' habits. The bookmarks of your browser are automatically added to the application and vice versa.
Yoono is "instant people-rated web", that while you surf displays a list of other web pages. These are "people-rated" since others have classified them in their favourites. So if you are viewing a web page Yoono returns the other web pages i.e. bookmarks that users have classified next to that page in their favorites. You can try them they could probably be of interest to you too!
Plus you get a list of users "yoosers" who have bookmarked the page in a “Shared” favourites folder. This is a folder with web sites you particularly like: your main centres of interest and it allows you to share these favourites with other users (they can also subscribe to them); as well as you will appear automatically in the search results related to what you shared thus you can see their folder which will have many related sites. You can also see the user’s profile by clicking on the underlined username and finally you get resources like blogs and other resources which talk about the site you are visiting.
You can also find other users who have a particular web page in their favourites either via suggestions or via a user you already know.
Yoono let your browser add-on send the URL of the current page to Yoono's server. This is to display suggestions. However Yoono does not store this information. The URL of the current page is sent to Yoono if you have the “Ticker” displayed in the toolbar or the sidebar. Otherwise no information is sent. So when the ticker or sidebar is on “Locked”, the URL is not sent.
There are three versions of Yoono:
  • Yoono Companion this already worked with Internet Explorer and Firefox. It had many features bookmark synchronization, suggestions for URLs or bookmark folders, sharing/subscribing to other users bookmarks, feed reader and lots more. It will continue to work but it is superseded by on of the two following add-ons.
  • Firefox Extension: a simplified version of Yoono Companion with a toolbar giving instant suggestions as you browse the web, and a sidebar displaying the suggestions in a tree form.
  • Yoono Explorer Bar, soon to be released, which is the Yoono Companion integrated into Internet Explorer.
Yoono is for everybody, it is friendly and simple to use. You can find sites and users and it also manage your bookmarks and lets you share information. The basic functions are easy to understand, and you will discover more and more functions as you go along. Yoono is complementary to the classical search engine by bringing a human and community dimension to searching. It can be compared to social bookmarking tagging services. These are mostly based on the idea of tags or labels to allow bookmarks to found and exchanged between users.

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