I have never really adopted the use of Deli.cio.us, the best known social bookmarking and search tool. There was something about the spare, blank, austere user interface that annoyed me, so I never warmed to it. However, I am a great believer in the future of social search, so I turned to the new Yahoo My Web 2.0 with great interest, and now believe, like Waxy.org, that it is possibly a Deli.cio.us killer.

I continue to believe that the center of the social universe is the instant messaging buddy list metaphor: not just because I am biased toward real-time communication, but because human beings are the center of the socialized world. That's the rationale for the Nerdvana ideal that animates a series of posts I made over the past few months. However, the Yahoo My Web 2.0 builds on the Yahoo 360° social network metaphor, to decide who makes up my universe, which is a pretty good second-order approximation. I want to know what the Dunbar core group -- the 150ish most critical folks in my universe -- are reading, finding, thinking. My Yahoo 360° group includes Stuart Butterfield, Marc Canter, Jonas Luster, Greg Narain, Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, and a few dozen others, so the results are pretty indiciative of what My Web 2.0 might look like in a steady state of use. Here's a tagcloud based on the tags being used by my contacts in Yahoo 360°:

Ok, so I am going to start using the system for the next few weeks, and I plan a series of posts chronicling my experiences, and the commentary of other explorers.

Here's what the folks at Yahoo Search blog have to say about what they are up to:

[from Yahoo! Search blog: Search, with a little help from your friends]

Introducing Social Search

To address these kinds of limits of today's search experience, we are releasing an early beta version of My Web 2.0 for a limited number of users. It is a new kind of search engine -- a social search engine -- that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web. Here's some of what we think is interesting about My Web 2.0:

• The trusted web -- Anyone can save, tag, and share knowledge with their community. Any page on the web with your comments and insights. Your community can do the same. The result -- a new search experience that combines web search with what your trusted community has tagged and shared. Users can build their community by inviting their contacts via email or by importing existing social relationships from Yahoo! Address Book, Messenger, or their 360° community. My Web 2.0 then leverages the Yahoo! 360° personal network platform to enable people to manage their search community.

• Personalized search -- My Web 2.0 is powered by Yahoo!'s new MyRank Search Technology, which provides personalized search results based on the shared knowledge of the people they trust. Personalized search is also supported by our My Search History capability, (launched in My Web 1.0 ). Over time, you will see us integrate MyRank technology across other Yahoo! applications and services.

• Control over what is shared and with whom -- Each page saved and tagged can be shared with the world, just with friends and their friends, or kept private.

• Structured tagging -- The internet is about much more than web pages -- key dimensions like time and location can be as important as the content itself. With user-provided structured tags like "geo:[location]" applied to pages, search results can now can include maps to locations in addition to the web page.

• Open APIs - Through the use of My Web 2.0's XML and RDF APIs , a whole host of new applications can be built -- like what the folks in the Stanford University TAP project are working on.

How Is Social Search Different?

Social search complements web search, which is driven by publishers and web sites, by providing a better search experience that is powered by people and communities. Flickr is a great example of this power applied to photos and image search.

Much like links and anchor text enabled major improvements in web search by becoming a new source of authority for search engines, people and trust networks are now an additional source of authority for social search engines. In the same way that blogs and RSS are empowering individuals to participate in publishing, individuals and communities can now participate in search, using tools like My Web 2.0 that let them define what is valuable to them and their community.

Over time, we envision communities using My Web to build their own search engines to capture and make accessible the knowledge of their community -- search engines populated with the collective experience of a group of medical researchers, a community of PHP experts, a bird watching club, or members of a structural engineering consulting firm.

Ok, I am looking forward to the integration with Flickr and Messenger, but please make sure everything works with Mac, ok? The Yahoo Address book doesn't sync with Mac, and the newly released beta of Messenger (I wrote about it a few weeks ago: Not Nerdvana, But Maybe The Suburbs) doesn't run on OS X yet.