Yahoo Bookmarks: straightforward and useful

Yahoo just launched a beta of Yahoo Bookmarks, a hugely improved version of its current bookmark saver. It's a useful tool. I found it to be limited in scope, but that's actually a good thing right now. There are some really interesting information collection tools on the Web right now that are probably too complex for most users (yes, I'm talking to you, Diigo). Yahoo even has two other bookmarking tools itself: Del.icio.us and Yahoo My Web, both of which are more geared towards sharing bookmarks than saving them for yourself. [See related blog post.]

Yahoo Bookmarks is a very attractive bookmark tool. Saving pages is easy, via either a bookmarklet or a new button on the Yahoo browser toolbar. It saves thumbnails of pages alongside your links, and you can either categorize pages, or tag them, or both -- and you can select and change you organizational scheme (categories or tags) whenever you want. You can also drag your bookmarks onto categories or tags to organize them.

Bookmarks also works alongside Del.icio.us and My Web -- it can import your Del.icio.us bookmarks (a bit more cumbersome than it should be, but it does work) to get yourself started in Bookmarks, and the "Recommended" tab on Bookmarks apes the My Web home page.

You can share your bookmarks easily. There's a nice tool to send a collection of bookmarks via email. If this tool was around in May, I could have used it instead of JetEye to send a collection of products to a contractor.

If you want a simple and clear way to collect bookmarks (beyond your browser, that is), check this tool out. See also our comparison of bookmarking tools, Save every Web site.