yoono homepage

HOW DO I USE YOONO ? (part 1)

Suggestions - yoono is “instant people-rated web”. This means that while you surf, yoono displays a list of other web pages. These are “people-rated” - others have classified them in their favorites. You can also get suggestions for your favorites folders (right click on a folder “See suggestions”).

Surprises - click the Surprise! button to get a random suggestion based on your favorites.

Community - find other users who have a particular web page in their favorites (via suggestions or via a user you already know). Yoono IE Bar only: When you have found a user, you can subscribe to on of their shared folders - you’ll be informed when they add to the folder. The subscribed folder is displayed ion the Favorites tab.

Synchro - if you have more than 1 computer, yoono synchronizes your bookmarks between them.

HOW DO I USE YOONO ? (part 2 - “suggestions”)

If I’m viewing the page http://www.finedarkchocolate.com/. Yoono returns the following :

• other web pages - these are bookmarks that users have classified next to that chocolate page in their favorites. Try them out - they’ll probably interest you too ! (Tip: to keep the suggestions displayed while changing pag, click on “Lock the suggestions” - top left button in the Suggestions tab)
• users (yoosers) - who have bookmarked the page in a “Shared” favorites folder. You can see their folder which will have many related sites. (Tip:see the user’s profile by clicking on the underlined username)
• resources - blogs and other resources which talk about the site you’re visiting

DOES YOONO MONITOR THE SITES I VISIT ?

The browser add-on sends the URL of the current page to yoono. This is to display suggestions. Note that yoono does not store this information. The URL of the current page is sent to yoono if :

• you have the “Ticker” displayed in the toolbar OR
• the sidebar is displayed

Otherwise, no information is sent. Note that when the ticker or sidebar is “Locked”, the url is not sent.

DO MY FAVORITES APPEAR IN THE SUGGESTIONS ?

Yes they can. Any bookmark you upload to yoono can be in the suggestions displayed to other users. (That’s how yoono works). You cannot be identified by that URL however. Note that any folder you mark as “Secret” is never sent to yoono.

DO I APPEAR IN THE SEARCH RESULTS ?

If you mark a folder as “Shared”, then other users can see it as one of your folders and it can appear in the suggestions. If you don’t want to appear, don’t share any folders. Defining folders in this way helps contacts to be made between users with the same interests. When users subscribe to your folder, it gives a measure of your expertise on a subject.

WHAT DOES THE “SURPRISE!” BUTTON DO ?

Surprise displays a random web page related to your favorites. It does not display pages you already have in your favorites. This helps you discover pages other users have in their favories.

WHAT IS A “SHARED FOLDER”

It is a folder with web sites you particularly like - your main centers of interest.

• It allows you to share these favorites with other users (they can subscribe to them)
• You’ll appear automatically in the search results related to what you shared

WHAT’S BOOKMARK SYNCHRONIZATION ?

It means having the same bookmarks at home and at work (and on your yoono home page).
When you install oono, your bookmarks are uploaded to your yoono account (except “Secret” folders). They’re displayed on your yoono page which is like : http://www.yoono.com/favorites.jsp?user-id=.

When you add/delete a bookmark on your computer (via the browser or via the yoono Internet Explorer Bar) it’s automatically added / deleted on your yoono web page. This means :

• you can see your bookmarks from anywhere
• if you have yoono at home and at work, yoono copies your bookmarks from your yoono account on the internet, to your computer

HOW MANY YOONOS ARE THERE ? (Companion, Explorer Bar, Firefox Extension) ?

• Yoono Companion - this worked with Internet Explorer and Firefox. It had many features - bookmark synchrozation, suggestions for URLs or bookmark folders, sharing/subscribing to other users bookmarks, feed reader and lots more. It will continue to work but it is superseded by on of the two following add-ons.
• Firefox Extension - this is a simplified version of Yoono Companion with a toolbar giving instant suggestions as you browse the web, and a sidebar displaying the suggestons in a tree form. We’re still very much working on this extension adding more functions.
• Yoono Explorer Bar (coming out third quarter 2006). This is in fact the Yoono Companion integrated into Internet Explorer. It makes it much easier and more logical to use than when it was a stand-alone application.

IS THERE A LIMIT TO THE NUMBER OF BOOKMARKS YOONO CAN HANDLE ?

Around 3000 or 4000. Yoono on the client side tends to grind a bit (depending how powerful your computer is) when you’ve got a lot of bookmarks. As one says “we’re working on this”.

About the Yoono Bot

For a few weeks now we have been running a bot identified by this User-Agent string :

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yoono; http://www.yoono.com/)

Some people asked us what this bot was precisely doing. Yoono is a social search engine based on the fact that our users share parts of their bookmarks, so why would we need to have a bot crawl the web ?

Well, our bot is doing a few things that we need to do by ourselves :

1. We fetch the URL that are referenced in our users’ bookmarks in order to retrieve an official title for the page. Some people like to customize the title associated to their bookmarks, so we cannot systematically trust the title they could provide us when sharing an URL with other users. Therefore, our bot regularly check the “true” title of the web page.
2. When we fetch a webpage, we look for related RSS / Atom feeds and cross index them, in order to give you the soon-to-be released “blogsearch” feature. Whenever you are visiting a web site or blog article, the blogsearch feature gives you related blog articles, so that you can immediatly discover the blogosphere buzz around what you are currently reading. For this, we need to regularly fetch the entire RSS / Atom feeds.

The bot refreshes the web page titles once a week, and RSS / Atom feeds once an hour. We implemented HTTP conditional GET (with Last-Modified and ETag), so if your server supports it, the impact on your bandwidth and CPU will be minimal.

HOW DO I UNINSTALL YOONO ?

FIREFOX ADD-ON

Go to the menu Tools/Extensions. Select Yoono, then click the uninstall button. You’ll need relaunch Firefox. It helps us if you tell us (in the forum) why you unstalled.

EXPLORER ADD-ON / YOONO COMPANION

Windows Menu “Start” / Programs / Yoono Explorer Bar( or Yoono Companion), then Uninstall

CAN I CHANGE MY NICKNAME / ACCOUNT ?

You cannot change the nickname for a yoono account.

To change account, click on the yoono button in the toolbar, then select Change password.
To change account, click on the yoono button in the toolbar, the select Change user.

If you don’t have a nickname, then from the sidebar, click on “Make yourself known” at the top of the toolbar.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BOOKMARK AND A FAVORITE ?

Same thing - Internet Explorer calls them Favorites, Firefox calls them bookmarks. We use both terms here (so we can address user of IE and Firefox at the same time).

Our corporate blurb questions

Who is yoono intended for?

In theory for everybody. We make a lot of effort so it’s friendly and simple to use. You can find sites and users and it also manage your bookmarks and lets you share information (and don’t even get me started on the feed aggregator (IE only for now). The basic functions are easy to grasp, and you’ll discover more and more functions as you go along.

How is it different from other search engines?

yoono, is a new generation search engine…

Web searching can often be tedious. Most search engines return tens or hundreds of pages and generally only the first page is read. How can we be sure that they are the best results? How can we quickly find what we’re looking for without consulting too many web sites ? How can we find who is referencing the pages ? Today the search engines index keywords in web pages. To produce the results, they automatically classify the pages by a clever calculation known as the « page ranking ». This comes from weighing a number of links pointing to and pointed from a page. The real popularity of a web site “its audience” is far from being taken into account…

yoono puts the web user back at the heart of the web.
yoono was born from the desire of its founders to get back the initial spirit of the web. To allow individuals to exchange informations pertinentes, quickly and freely. The web was created to facilitate communication between people, yoono is in the same s’inscrit dans cette démarche.

What are the advantages of yoono compared to its competitors ?

Yoono is complementary to the classical search engine by bringing a human and community dimension to searching.

Yoono can be compared to “social bookmarking” or “social tagging” services. These are mostly based on the idea of tags (or labels) to allow bookmarks to found and exchanged between users.

From our point of view these solutions depend too much on the language of each user to name the classification labels. This major defect generates sometimes very surprising search results…

Yoono is a new generation of social or collaborative software:

• Yoono frees the user from constraints of language and synonyms.
• Yoono reuses existing data and maintains user habits. The bookmarks of your browser are automatically added to the application and vice versa.
• Yoono has a friendly, productive user interface, hosted on the user’s computer.

Yoono’s charter