a blog by Ian Kennedy
Slate’s got a column titled, Stealers, on how the refs handed the Steeler’s the Super Bowl victory and Joe Beulaurier over on the Unofficial Yahoo Blog writes about a snap poll on Yahoo Sports where you could make your voice heard right after the play.
I was hoping to just let the dust settle a bit before choosing to post but then I was reminded that my last post on weird Japanese exercise devices seems to be an odd welcome to anyone looking for a perspective on the latest hullabaloo from someone focused on social media projects at Yahoo.
Early yesterday morning, I posted my befuddlement on an internal mailing list. An active discussion followed and many agreed that the quote seemed strangely out of character. Anyone who has heard our CFO speak knows that giving up the good fight is totally at odds with the Sue Decker we know.
Yahoo’s been in the business of connecting people to what they want for ten years and have gone from being a simple directory of useful links to a full suite of services that range from Fantasy Sports to Web Hosting. Not only is Yahoo testing innovative and experimental ways to search, we also provide you with answers. We’re hiring some of the best minds to think long and hard about not only what the next generation search engine will be but, more importantly, what the next generation of the internet will look like. Hint: it’s not just on your PC anymore.
One of the reasons I joined Yahoo is because I saw that they was a vision for an internet which kept people in the center. Powerful tools married to funny and sometimes irreverent design choices. You could read the documentation and see that it was written by a person. It was good to know there was a news desk deciding which ten headlines to put on www.yahoo.com. When your IM client actually laughs at you, it was refreshingly goofy.
Back to the title of this post – we still have a long way to go. Sure, we all are working feverishly on search but I think the context that was missed in the Sue Decker quote was that there is so much more to do around search that is equally interesting and important. The more people I meet at Yahoo, the more I am amazed at the energy and enthusiasm for this next phase. You can see the pieces coming together – tagging, social networks, user ratings & recommendations, geographic and temporal identifiers, developer outreach, RSS in and out – everyone here is sucking it all in and amped up in anticipation of how great it’s going to be to build the stuff we only dreamed about in the past. Trust me, there’s some real cool stuff coming down the pike.
One of the great things in my job is that I get to talk to people across the company, in many different business units and regions. The excitement over social media and how open interaction with our users can infuse our products with relevance and humanity is not limited to just one department – every Product Manager is thinking through the possiblilities of what the new people-powered internet will look like and is hard at work putting these ideas to work. Yesterday, there was a mini-trade show of sorts where one group was showcasing all the great platform tools they are building and were showing them off to anyone interested just to get folks thinking how these services could play with each other. It was great to listen in on some of the hallway conversations taking place – new services being born every minute.
Yahoo has only just begun but the pieces are coming together and, as the title of this blog suggests, there’s going to be an arc that will flash two experiences together (search & community) to create a new online experience that will be a quantum leap ahead of what we have today. This new environment will have us looking back at the days of keyword searching as quaintly as we now look back to the blinking C:\> prompt of old.
Yahoo announced today that it has acquired the shared playlist service, WebJay. A one man operation that is the brainchild of Lucas Gonze who will be joining Yahoo and spreading the joy. In his own words:
From the audio and video perspective, the meaning of playlists is that they’re the container format for the internet. CDs are over; mixtapes are only an analogy;
– sourced from tnl.net
There’s a site up today that walks you through Yahoo’s vision of service which connects you to your information regardless of the device you use, your PC desktop, your TV, or your cellphone. It’s called Yahoo Go.
Russell Beattie’s got an updating list of media coverage links.
So I’m really happy to see the announcement. I knew this was in the works but, because I used to work at Six Apart, I stayed away from getting too involved in the details of this partnership. I’d write more but I’m in the middle of the Syndicate conference. I’d just like to say it’s great to see blogs integrated into the Yahoo Small Business offering in a click-to-install way so that Small Business customers can take advantage of Six Apart’s premier product.
In the grand tradition of using my employer’s products, I’m moving this blog over to a new site that I set up on the Small Business service. It took me all of 10 minutes to set up my blog and import my posts into my Movable Type installation. Bear with me while I work through templates and plug-in tuning over the next few weeks.
Happy Friday! I’m really pleased to write that Yahoo closed an acquisition of the social bookmarking service del.icio.us. Congratulations to everyone involved in making this happen. Along with the earlier acquisitions of upcoming.org and flickr, Yahoo is well on it’s way to bringing the best of the new web to the masses.
For more details from Yahoo, see the Search Blog entry by Jeremy and for the take from Del.icio.us, read Joshua’s post, y.ah.oo! Even the investor posts some happiness.
There are lots of questions as to what Yahoo is going to do with this service, some more obvious than others. I like to think that the social tagging aspect of the service will serve to inform the Yahoo service on what’s important and one up our neighbors up the road. Earlier this week, Bradley Horowitz, a Director in the Search team, was interviewed by the Financial Times and spoke about how the Page Rank algorithm gives too much influence to the webmasters:
But, as Mr Horowitz points out, the hierarchy is decided by webmasters, the controllers of website content: “The webmasters get to vote by proxy on what’s important to all of us; they cast everyone’s vote, so we are slaves to the webmaster’s idea of what is important.”
He goes on: “This next phase of personal and social search means that we will empower individuals with the privilege of voting on what’s important for them and expose that so communities and social networks and other groups can leverage that information. The intention is to base social search on open standards in order to spread its influence beyond the Yahoo environment.
Grand product plans aside, based on the buzz on the internets, bringing del.icio.us into the fold sure makes us look good.
USA Today’s got the story, and Zatz Not Funny has screenshots. I’ll have to try this when I get home.
People who create free accounts with Yahoo will be able to use its
Yahoo Photos service. They can use their TVs to view photos that
friends or family have put online. Also, Yahoo will provide local
weather forecasts and traffic reports.
It looks like they also put a podcasting client in there. I wonder if this means that I’ll be able to view the Diggnation Thanksgiving Special (available in audio or video) on my Tivo?
UPDATE: I logged into my Tivo account and see that the service has not been rolled out yet. To get on the priority list, enter your Tivo Account number from this page.
RSS reading is going to be integrated into the next version of Yahoo Mail which is out in limited beta (to get on the beta list, go to What’s New with Yahoo! Mail). John Furrier sat down to talk with Scott Gatz and Ethan Diamond of Yahoo who both played a big part in the integration. Scott has also posted a couple of screenshots so you can see what it looks like).
Scott’s got some great things to say about how Yahoo views RSS from the perspective of the average Joe and, in the quote below, how Yahoo envisions enabling personal networks of the future.
We recognize that people consume RSS differently. Some want to read it on their mobile device, some want to read on their on
personalized home page….in their Inbox, some want to be tapped on the shoulder when their feed has been updated, some want to read it on Yahoo news, and some people want to search through it. Some people want to do a little bit of all of that. The great thing about Yahoo is we learn about you, we learn about what sources you care about, and we integrate all of those pieces so they come together. If you are at your home computer, your work computer… on your phone, no matter where you are at… that information should follow you. It shouldn’t be tied to one computer… one software application. It should follow you wherever you go. That is the benefit of personalization on Yahoo… the idea that it knows who you are, it remembers those things and makes them easier and easier… as we integrate it throughout the entirety of Yahoo…wherever you want it to be.
This will be the beauty of synching your personal details to a service and “living in the cloud.” Microsoft’s recent announcement of Windows & Office Live is not all that revolutionary. Apple had their .mac service and Synch around before that and Yahoo’s Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad have been delivering an internet-enabled PIM for years. Putting stuff online and having it available whenever and wherever you need it is old hat. The next step is to have your information synch seemlessly between your various internet-enabled devices and begin to make choices for you based on your method of access.
I subscribe to a feed of traffic conditions on my reader because a feed saves me browsing to a site and entering in a few keystrokes. I really only look at this feed right before I head to my car to go home. Sometimes I forget to check and then there’s that panic as I drive towards the freeway and have to decide between two or three routes home. Which will it be? I hope the traffic update from Dana Fields comes on NPR before I have to choose.
The smart alternative is to have Yahoo! send me alerts of any severe traffic conditions that may impact my drive home via SMS to my cell phone from 4 to 7 pm each night. That’s utility.
Last week I met one of the editors of Yahoo Sports and he gently reminded me that Kevin Sites and Richard Bangs are not the first instances of original reporting coming from Yahoo. Yahoo Sports has had it’s own exclusive analysts providing original coverage for several years and have blazed many of the trails faced by new media companies such as securing credentials for events and getting access for interviews.