Yokway Review – What’s Yoking?
Yokway is a new collaborative bookmarking service with some Digg like voting features and social networking functions which is primarily geared towards sharing content within a small circle of friends. Louis Gray first wrote about Yokway a month ago (also see his review here) and, at the time, found a loophole to get in without a beta invite, but the loophole was closed before I got in and so I had to wait for my beta invite, which arrived last night.
Yokway puts a number of interesting twists on the idea of collaborative bookmarking, including a somewhat hidden feature called “My Sharing Circle,” which, in lieu of a more complex tagging feature, allows you to put your bookmarks into user defined categories. You can also subscribe to these circles.
The easiest way to bookmark sites is through Yokway’s bookmarklet, which is easy to use and gives you the opportunity to write a short comment about the bookmark as well.
Once bookmarked, Yokway not only gives you the opportunity to vote on any given post (one to five stars), but also to comment on it and, in case you don’t like it anymore, to “forget about it.”
The one features I’m sorely missing from Yokway is RSS feeds. Being able to subscribe to somebody’s bookmarks or to a Sharing Circle would make me far more likely to bookmark pages and to return to the site regularly. I can’t imagine that the developers over at Yokway aren’t working on this already, but for now, this is the one deal breaker for me.
Update: Just heard from the Yokway developers and it looks like they just took the feeds down to work on them and that they are actually working on getting them up “with a twist.“
Overall, Yokway is a very well executed idea, both in terms of design and basic functionality. It does, however, compete with a number of slightly similar services such as delicious, as well as aggregators such as FriendFeed and Socialthing, both of which have a lot of hype going for them right now. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if Yokway would find its own niche.
Some more thoughts:
- The layout if very nice. Clean and functional.
- No tagging?
- It would be nice to be able to see the Sharing Circles your friends are subscribed to. So far, I have not been able to find this.
- The voting feature gives you the option to be a bit more granular with your feedback than just ‘liking’ or ‘digging’ a submission. It would be nice to have the option to also see the most popular submissions – but then that’s probably not the focus of Yokway so that’s quite forgivable.
- This seems to a service that would do very well as a facebook app – something I usually don’t say much, but I can see it taking off in that setting.
There are no RSS feeds, which means I can’t take my data out of the service and pull the stream into FriendFeed or my RSS reader. I assume the team over at Yokway is working on this, but for now, that’s definitely a deal breaker.
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