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As we mentioned earlier today, Yahoo has updated/released a new service called [Yahoo Bookmarks][2]. At first I thought Bookmarks was an improvement for the existing Yahoo MyWeb service (which has long offered a bookmark storage service), but it turns out it's a separate product. What makes it all even more confusing is that Yahoo actually acquired De.lico.us some time ago so now they technically have three bookmarking services (Del.icio.us users there's no need to freak out, [Del.icio.us isn't going anywhere][1]).
Yahoo's services have always been a bit of a jumble (go the home page and try to find a link to MyWeb) and frankly I still haven't figured out a way to get to the new Bookmarks service without typing it straight in the url. But it is in beta so we'll leave that alone for now.
If you'd like to see what all the new Bookmarks service has to offer there's [an excellent screencast available][3], but I'll give a quick overview anyway.
Yahoo Bookmarks has all the standard bells and whistles we've come to expect in bookmarking sites such as annotations, tags and thumbnails. It also offers a caching feature much like [Ma.gnolia][4] which stores the content of the page so it's accessible even if the page disappears. Personally this is the reason I switched from Del.icio.us to Magnolia some time ago so kudos to Yahoo for offering this feature. Unfortunately the "view saved copy" link didn't actually work when I tested it, but it may just take a little while for Yahoo to actually cache the page.
The integration with the Yahoo toolbar is seamless and quite nice, something I wish other services were better at providing. Yahoo also claims it's working on integrating with FireFox which would be nice for users that don't want to be bound to the Yahoo toolbar.
While at first glance Bookmarks looks a lot like a better designed, AJAX heavy De.lico.us, they're really quite different. For one thing, Yahoo Bookmarks is not a social bookmarking site, it's a way to store your bookmarks online. You can share bookmarks by emailing them to others, but there is no "community pool" feature and no searching through other users bookmarks such as del.ici.ous offers.
There are more powerful bookmarking sites out there, but Yahoo's interface is nice and for existing Yahoo users the addition of Bookmarks will no doubt prove useful. As for those already using Del.icio.and other services, or those wanting the sharing aspect of social bookmarking site, Yahoo's new service may leave you wanting.
And finally I should note that Safari had some issues with Yahoo's JavaScript features, but everything worked well in FireFox. Your mileage may vary.
[1]: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/24/Yahoo-bookmarks-enters-21st-century/#comment-298831
[2]: http://beta.bookmarks.Yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Bookmarks"
[3]: http://beta.bookmarks.Yahoo.com/welcome "Yahoo Bookmarks Screencast"
[4]: http://ma.gnolia.com "Social bookmarking with Ma.gnolia"
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