Save and share stories with friends using YokWay
Find and share stories alone or in groups with YokWay, a simple and easy-to-use content-sharing site that's just short of being useful in today's crowded aggregation market.
In an era of aggregators, YokWay is a very pretty sharing service. Much like Delicious or FriendFeed, the idea is to discover new content based on what other people are sharing. YokWay's appeal is much like that of Digg, with popular stories hitting the front page and getting rated and commented on by other users.
User-submitted content is split up into different buckets, with books, music, videos, and photos. There's also a restaurants category that turns the service into something like Yelp, where users can microblog about their culinary experiences. To aid in that, each story is geo-tagged, letting you see where it's coming from right on a Google map.
There are several ways to populate the site with content. You can record a video using Seesmic, or simply write in some text. Pulling up an item like a book or movie that you've seen uses Amazon.com and Yelp's directory, so other users will be able to click on it and buy it right away, which is part of YokWay's business model.
If you want to band together and populate your news to a specific channel, YokWay has interest groups called "circles" that you can subscribe to or create your own. Oddly enough, these cannot be privatized to keep random YokWay users from joining, which is a real shame if you're trying to use it as a link-sharing tool in a small team. For that, Delicious or FriendFeed offer a might tighter closed gate approach.
Ultimately, YokWay came off to me as a less compelling experience than FriendFeed or Delicious if only for the lack of people using it and tie-ins with other services. As a link-sharing service among friends it's very streamlined, but with no private rooms, mobile application, or bustling front page with high story turnover I'm left wanting more.
YokWay is currently in private beta. You can sign up here.
