MyWeb 2.0.2

John Battelle reported today that Yahoo! has upgraded MyWeb 2.0. Users can now search "everybody’s tabs," which basically expands the social search aspect of the service. MyWeb along with Yahoo!-owned del.icio.us could be central elements to Yahoo!’s overall "folksonomy" strategy that relies on the power of people to tag content (rather than the more Google-esque approach of using lots of computing power to index the Web).

BUT, there are still very few users of MyWeb, and Yahoo! hasn’t done much to market it (the company doesn’t disclose how many users it has, but there are 709,927 saved pages as of today — I alone account for 350 of those). This could change soon, as enhancements to the service are a good sign that it’s getting closer to prime time (remember, it’s still in beta), and a possible marketing push.

The point is that social search can only be as good as the amount of people using it, and there’s definitely a critical mass to make it work on a large scale. We’ll explore MyWeb and the dynamics of social search in an upcoming White Paper.