The site works around topics, with users adding links and content under any topic they like. Content may include embedded videos of baby seals being clubbed for example, or just links to a webpage. The experience is geared to making it easy for anyone to create “Bundles” and in terms of layout, although it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing site, they’ve thought it through fairly well.

One interesting addition is the ability to take Bundles off site through widgets, allowing users to create shared content and take it anywhere.

As a standalone product it has potential; these sorts of sites can and do find dedicated audiences, but here’s where I do take umbrage: the rhetoric behind the service doesn’t deliver on site.

The front page starts with these fine PR words “YouBundle is the Next generation of Search and Collaboration on the Internet.” Um…no it’s not.

This is not a new idea. This is Hubpages or Squidoo with widgets thrown in for good measure. This is a social bookmarking site like Delicious, but made more complicated. This is Mahalo, but not implemented as nicely.

There is nothing remarkably ground breaking about YouBundle.

Doriano Carta at Mashable writes that the ability to mix content “truly is amazing” and that

Is their service offering anything new? I think the answer is yes thanks to the ability to share these bundles or streams through widgets and RSS feeds.

As we noted above, adding a widget may be a point of differentiation vs Squidoo or HubPages, but widgets and/ or with RSS streams ARE NOT NEW. This is not new, period.

I don’t want to be too hard on this company; content/ search plays of this nature have a reasonable track record of building an audience, and there is absolutely no reason why these guys won’t go well, but seriously, I thought we were over this PR BS hype….obviously not.

Video demo below. Content warning: includes unsubstantiated hype

No related posts.

From the outset, the Yokway layout will appear immediately familiar to users of services such as FriendFed and Social Thing. The service offers shared items in reverse chronological order, and other users can comment on these shared items. Outbrain style, each story can be rated between one and five stars, with a tally showing how many times an item has been voted on.

Where Yokway is different is in the way the items in the river of news are shared. This isn’t an aggregator, so no items are automatically shared. Instead users must contribute items directly, social bookmarking or even Digg style. Where it’s even more different is with the submission box. Instead of simply asking for a direct URL, the submission box in Yokway offers a search facility, so for example if you wanted to add a movie you have just seen, and comment on it, you’d type the name of the movie in and it would recommend pages about the movie you can post. To be honest I found this a little annoying, but considered as a consumer friendly ease of use feature, it certainly has appeal possibilities.

Yokway is strongly focused on community and groups. The service allows for the creation of “sharing circles” that can be focused on shared interests with other friends. Contacts are also allocated by relationship as well, adding an additional layer to networking on the site.

Louis Gray wrote about the service when they first went into closed beta back in March, and he had this to say at the time: “The service will have an uphill road to climb to take on sites like FriendFeed or Digg who have significant market traction.” It’s a fair call.

It’s a neat enough sharing platform, but I’m struggling with what unmet need Yokway addresses. I won’t go as far as suggesting it’s a solution looking for a problem because I’m going to guess that this is a consumer, non-tech focused service. There could be no other explanation for a fluffy bunny color scheme that gives me a headache and a layout to match. My Yahoo is an immensely popular RSS reading platform that few in the tech space use, Yokway could quite easily turn out to be Yahoo News in the same way that FriendFeed is Google Reader.

Related posts:

1. Five Reasons FriendFeed Is Better Than Digg
2. Why You Should Use FriendFeed
3. Bloombla: sort of Twitter meets what you’ve done