Nicolas Lehuen's Weblog

My friend Laurent Quérel has eventually launched yoono.com after a few years of hard thinking and a little more than one year of development with his team. I’m kinda on the advisory board (well, I’ve got a few tenth of percent of shares, that is , so I’m quite happy to see the product out at last.

The web site is in French only for the moment, but the English version is going online Real Soon Now^TM. In the mean time, let me explain what Yoono does.

I suppose you already know del.icio.us or Yahoo! MyWeb ? Well, Yoono is also about sharing bookmarks to help you search high-quality sites, except that Yoono users don’t need to tag their bookmarks.

You see, tagging is soooo 2005 . Seriously, tagging has been proven to have a lot of problems, the first one being a convergence problem : different people tend to tag things differently (« should I tag this under bookmark, bookmarks or favorites ?« ), with different words (especially since people tend to speak different languages). This leads to the balkanization of knowledge and the difficulty to find the right tag which can give you an answer to a particular question.

Yoono solves this problem by automatically inferring a classification of bookmarks from a statistical analysis of the bookmarks of its users. The core idea is that when two bookmarks are classified together (in the same folder) by a lot of Yoono users, then you may be interested in the second one when you bookmark the first. It’s exactly what Amazon.com does when you order something (« Other customers have also bought…« ), and it’s called collaborative filtering.

So what’s the user experience ? Well, all you have to do is install the Yoono Companion, a Win32 application (other platforms are planned) which will run in the tray area on your task bar. You can then keep on using Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox as usual, you don’t need to change the way you use your favorite browser’s bookmarking system. No need to use a crappy web interface when your browser has everything built-in ! Each time you bookmark a site of interest, the Yoono Companion is notified, requests a set of suggestion from the Yoono server, and a small bubble window appears on your desktop with those suggestions. That’s all.

But that’s only the beginning. By default, you’re totally anonymous. The Yoono Companion sends your bookmark to the server (you can of course opt out all or part of your bookmark, keeping some areas for private use), but nothing more. We don’t know who you are, we don’t even request a login/password, email address or anything ! This way, you anonymously contribute to the global knowledge of the Yoono community of users. But if you want, you can create a profile and actively publish your bookmarks. People can suscribe to your bookmark folders, and be notified when you add something to them. And if you have a big enough audience, who knows, you might be given the expert status and be suggested to other Yoono users when they look for expertise in your field.

Yoono also integrates the concepts of bookmarks and RSS feeds. When you bookmark a site, it’s because you want to come back to it later, right ? And when you suscribe to an RSS feed, it’s usually to come back to the site to read some new content. Well, why not bookmark your RSS feeds and use Yoono as a full-blown RSS reader ? No need to maintain two separate lists of bookmarks and RSS feeds, Yoono integrates both and gives you a neat way of being always up to date.

That’s not the end of it, but the web site will soon contain a lot of information in English, so I’ll stop there. Amongst the features I leave aside are a Firefox extension, a synchronization system which allow you to always have your bookmarks and RSS feeds at hand everywhere, out-of-band forums and much more !

Yoono is currently in its beta phase with a small set of users, so please, if you notice anything weird, do not hesitate to tell us !