Yoono Invites & Head-to-Head Comparison with Digsby, Flock
Social bookmarking tool Yoono has been in the works for quite some time now, and it’s finally emerging from private beta. With over 1 million users, Yoono isn’t really much of a secret, but now you have a chance to play with this player that’s making itself known in the social bookmarking and aggregation space.
You may recall that Yoono acts as a browser add-on that lets you chat and share items with friends instantly, while offering recommendations as you browse the web and also enabling you to update your status across various networks and bookmark items for personal use as well.
So even though Yoono claims to be everything Flock should have been, how does it actually stack up to the competition? Let’s compare Yoono to some of its rivals, including Flock, the recently launched Vysr, Digsby and Minggl.
Ease of Use
Yoono and its competitors are all downloadable applications, but beyond that, how easy is it to use Yoono? So far, Yoono isn’t quite ready for IE support, but Firefox is good to go. Flock is its own browser, while Vysr supports all major browsers. Digsby is a standalone application that sits on your desktop and Minggl isn’t available for Firefox just yet.
When it comes to basic use scenarios, Yoono is no-intrusive until you begin interacting with it. The screen will gray in order to view images and video content overlaid on your browser window. Flock takes more setup time in order to get all your supporting accounts set up, while Vysr is a very quick 1-step process. Digsby is a longer download and setup process and I’ve had some trouble with some of its recent updates crashing the service, while Minggl takes a bit of education for consumers in order to us the service optimally.
Status Updates and Lifestreams
Microblogging is central to web activity, so having a central location to update your status across multiple sites is a requirement. All of the services except Vysr has this option at the moment. As an aggregator for your friends’ lifestreams, Vysr is missing this as well.
Yoono has a very handy filter capability that allows you to dig down into your friends’ content across networks and stream content, though this can still be a slightly disparate process with Yoono. Digsby is probably the next runner up in this particular category, as it integrates life-streaming and email messaging capabilities, with direct interaction for all your updating processes.
Shareability
Yoono is also a chat tool that lets you share items from the web immediately with your friends. Drag and drop items from the web into your Yoono sidebar tool, whether it be a selected piece of text, videos and images, and it will become immediately available to your friends, depending on what chat tool they’re currently using.
As Yoono supports chat for AOL and MSN, amongst others, you’re likely to capture all your friends for the chat tool. Digsby also supports chat, including the recently launched Facebook chat tool, though it’s lacking the drag’n’drop simplicity of an in-browser tool. Flock also has drag’n’drop sharing capabilities, and all of the comparable services support or are planning to support personal bookmarking tools.
Differentiating factors
While Yoono, Flock, Vysr, Digsby and Minggl all dabble in personal data aggregation of some sort, each service also branches over into a couple of different areas.
Yoono has an interesting combination of personal aggregation of life-streaming and bookmarking, as well as chat.
Flock, as a browser, also has the capabilities of presenting its tool as a platform for future development for other social tools, though it often finds itself looking to natively integrate the best aspects of browser add-ons we see for Firefox.
Vysr, though it has chat, does not particularly act as a profile aggregation tool. It’s major point of comparison for this article, however, is its potential as a “personal startpage” as a browser add-on. Both Yoono and Vysr both take some of the social features that startpages like Netvibes are trying to do with initiatives like Ginger. Click here to see a video intro of Vysr from my meeting with founder Guda Venkatesh at the Web 2.0 Expo last week.
Digsby has an interesting desktop application that is highly interactive, minimizing the necessity of trekking across various social networks. As we’ve seen with the success of Twhirl, such integrated desktop apps currently have a lot of promise.
Minggl’s personalization tools allow for complete control of the presentation of your social networking profil, enabling you to create separate interfaces for various audiences, on top of its browser plug-in.
