We are streamlining our bookmark services. As part of this effort Yahoo! will be shutting down MyWeb on March 18, 2009 and moving users to Yahoo! Bookmarks. Your MyWeb bookmarks are already available to you on Yahoo! Bookmarks. You can begin using this new service now or continue using MyWeb until the shutdown date.

Yahoo made the announcement a few days ago along with three options for moving your bookmarks to other locations. Obviously, one is through Yahoo Bookmarks as mentioned above. Your bookmarks are already available there.

You can also use Delicious, the popular Yahoo-owned social bookmarking site. You can move your bookmarks there via a simple three-step process:

1. Export your bookmarks
2.Register for a Delicious Account
3. Upload the XML file using the "manual import" option.

Or, you can simply export your bookmarks using Yahoo’s export tools, which will provide an archive of them that is easily readable by third-party services and browsers.

Some people think the move to shut down MyWeb makes perfect sense since Yahoo already has two more bookmarking services. Still, others prefer MyWeb, and will be disappointed to see it go. The service never left beta.

Yahoo’s Search Blog noted the arrival of an updated MyWeb interface with extra features for its social bookmarking users.

“Perhaps the most significant shift in this release has less to do with any one feature, but is simply the realization that social bookmarking is catching on with people with very diverse passions and interests,” Tom Chi, MyWeb Product Lead, wrote in the entry.

Keeping up with those social bookmarkers has led to the addition of new features to the MyWeb service.

Additional information on those new features appeared on MyWeb’s blog page.

On MyWeb’s homepage, the top tags as used by members of the service can be viewed at the top of the page.

MyWeb also lists the Interesting Today links to sites that have been getting attention within the system.

Searching for tags through the Tag Finder can uncover which users have been applying particular tags to stories.

Mousing over the name of a user displays a small window that shows their avatar and provides links to view the person’s detail or add them as a contact.

The search feature now covers all public pages in the MyWeb system. Formerly, only the pages bookmarked by the user and his or her contacts could be searched.

The MyWeb Tools page now contains an export feature. One’s saved pages can be exported as a bookmarks file for use directly within a web browser.

Chi wrote that this feature had been requested by MyWeb users, and the MyWeb team has heard those requests.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Users of Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 service can control their sharing and add contacts to their lists without needing the contact to accept an invitation first.

The MyWeb 2.0 team posted about the new features in their blog. Users of the service may find that since the upgrade a couple of days ago, existing contacts may now be listed as Friends. The two default groups, Friends and Family, can be renamed per the user’s preferences.

Sharing access can be defined based on these two groups. This lets users keep certain things from being shared with others, or to coin a phrase, what happens on the Net stays on the Net.

MyWeb users who find another user with interesting links can add that user as a contact right away. “Once you add a contact, they’ll receive a notification in our new messaging system. As part of this upgrade, changes made to your My Web contact list will no longer impact your 360 contact list, and vice versa,” the My Web team said in a message to users.

Once the contact has been added, that contact can be labeled with one of the group names available to the My Web user. To let those contacts and others on My Web know more about them, users can edit their profiles in My Web with a nickname and an image, which can be one of Yahoo’s Avatars.

Yahoo also made changes to the MyWeb user’s homepage.

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Then it struck me a few minutes ago.

I think she understands MyWeb 2.0 more than some of the people who created the product. She’s able to describe, in her own terms, exactly what MyWeb 2.0 is useful for and continues on to explain her problem with it:

One of the strangest things about MyWeb, and possibly the reason it hasn’t caught the imagination yet, is that the three functions I mention above — personal server-side bookmarking, social network-filtered linkstream, and human-powered search engine — use what amounts to three different UIs, two of which are unattractive and/or hard to use.

She put her finger on something that’s been bugging me for a while now, but I could never figure it out.

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Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

When Yahoo launched Y!Q, the company’s contextual search service, they also included the Y!Q Demobar. The Y!Q toolbar gave users the capabilities of highlighting a portion of text (users can highlight an entire article if they choose) and trigger a contextual search.

While the usability of such the Y!Q Demobar was not question, the fact that users had to download two toolbars to get all of Yahoo’s available search features was, according to the Yahoo Search blog. Because of the feedback concerning multiple toolbars, Yahoo has released an update to their main toolbar, which now features the capabilities of Y!Q. When users highlight a portion of text and select the search option, which is apart of the actuator button that appears when text is selected.

Y!Q is not the only feature that’s been added to the latest Yahoo Toolbar version (and the toolbar is not the only place Y!Q capabilities have been added either). Other toolbar additions include the ability to save query results to MyWeb, Yahoo’s personalized search feature; as well as controls for the Y! Music Engine.

The Y!Q feature has also been added to Yahoo’s instant messenger client. When Yahoo Messenger users activate the LiveWords feature, certain words from the conversation are underlined. When users click these underlined words, they trigger a search of the underlined text. Users can also highlight IM text and generate Y!Q searches using this method as well.

If you would like to update your Yahoo toolbar in order to use these features, you can do so here.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.