Recently, I’ve added a new weapon to my Web 2.0 arsenal called Yoono. Actually, Yoono (as in You Know) has existed on my Firefox for a few months, but I never really put it to use. For three months it was Just Another Plug-In on my Firefox front end, and thus not getting much of a workout. Recently, I decided to take it out for a spin. And it was a revelation.
Yoono is technically known as a social-networking data aggregator. In plainer English, Yoono allows you to round up all of your social networking applications in one location. Yoono supports, among other applications Twitter, AOL and Yahoo IMs, Facebook, Imeen, and GoogleTalk. In this way you can constantly get a stock-ticker feed for as many social media sites as you please. You can look at everything at once (trust me, on my machine, that’s a tsunami of information), or zero in on each application one at a time; first my Facebook friends, Yahoo IM contacts, etc. But it gets better. More on that later.
Launching Yoono
creates a unique task bar that some may find almost intrusive. as you can see above, it runs vertically
on the left side of the browser, although it can be minimized with a
click. However, I found the UI to be clean in design with little clutter, and when
I expand the browser to full screen, I find that I don’t mind the strip. A
small advertising bar sits in the bottom part of the Yoono window.
I can search
Wikipedia if I desire without opening a new tab on the browser (see below) . The search
function is a wonder. It is context based search, so whatever appears on the
web page will appear in the search window. In the example below, I have a LiveJournal window active, and when the Discovery widget (Yoono's name for the search) is activated, note all of the Livejournal-related posts.
There is also a Video widget, and combining these seems to bring us closer to the semantic web. Here’s how: I got to YouTube and given the hoopla over the passing of pop icon Michael Jackson, I went to YouTube and looked up the video of his incredible Motown 25 performance back in 1983. I performed a drag and drop of the video screen into Web notes, and the fun really began. (Note: The video widget is in Beta, when it is ready, you would be able to detect and save videos on a page.)
The Discovery widget (the search page) showed various links to MJ,
I also saw the Wikipedia link to Jackson appear. But that wasn’t all. The Shopping widget showed saleable items and actions in eBay and Amazon. It was MJ-mania,
or at least as long as that web page was active. Take a look at the posts below - I think it's pretty impressive. In the first one, note the notification window that notified me of a tweet while I was engaged on YouTube. The search results are the result of the page, and my dragging and dropping the image into the Discovery window. The lower image shows the ongoing eBay and Amazon auctions.
In all there
are seven Widgets currently available: Friends, Discovery, Shopping, Web Notes,
Mail, Music and Notes. The latter three are currently in Beta stage, and Web Notes are lackingfull functionality. The Friends Widget
allows me to look at my Tweets and my Facebook friends, etc and update my
status for all in one swoop or separately. Updates come constantly in small
windows, and I must say, the updates look better than the Facebook updates sent
from my Firefox plug-in. The Mail widget allows me to combine my webmails in
one location. Music allows the user to stream music through imeem.
No
application is perfect of course, and Yoono has its drawbacks. If you have
multiple personalities on Yahoo IM for example, you can’t switch back and forth
(you have log into Yoono as you would the IM.), hence I could not look at my work and personal Facebook accounts. You will not have access to some
of the richer features of Facebook of course, and when I wanted to share photos
on Yahoo IM, I had to leave Yoono, and launch the full IM in order to do so.
Nor would I advise anyone to dump TweetDeck once Yoono is installed. I can
monitor tweets, but some of the nicer grouping functions are missing.
But that
isn’t important, as Yoono never billed itself as replacement for any of the aforementioned
tools, but as an aggregator, and it is very good at that. I’m impressed with
the UI, the performance, and especially with the relevant search function. I
think Yoono will become an important tool in my Web 2.0 arsenal.
Thanks for the great review! Love the feedback and feel free to give us more any time as you use the product. Our get satisfaction page (http://getsatisfaction.com/yoono) is a great place to submit ideas that the community can vote on. We're working on both multi account support as well as grouping functionality so stay tuned for that.
Todd Pringle
VP, Product Marketing @yoono
Posted by: Todd Pringle | July 16, 2009 at 06:21 PM