a blog by Ian Kennedy
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.
Niall Kennedy rolled up his sleeves and reverse engineered the Google Reader product to document the API that runs it. After posting his findings, Google let him know that they are planning on opening access to the API. Cool!
In other news, Microsoft has let it be known that the next version of Outlook will include the ability to read RSS feeds which includes the ability to drag a copy of a post into your mail folders. This feature, which is available today to anyone using the Yahoo! Mail Beta, completes the folding of RSS into the mail client where it will be indexed alongside all your email messages, further blurring the distinction between RSS and HTML email.
This is all good news in the march towards universal adoption of “feeds” as a distribution channel but spells trouble for the companies out there making their dime off a pure aggregation play. If this was a couple of years ago, I would have figured that the product that figures out how to deal with offline use and synchronization would end up the winner. Now, with over 50% of households using an always-on broadband connection, many of them equipped to handle wireless, I’m not so sure that offline is such a, “must have.” I started out using FeedDemon because it supported offline use but with the links being such an integral part of the experience of reading a feed, I rarely read my feeds unless I’m connected.
Look for Newsgator, Bloglines, and the others to differentiate themselves with innovative new features to keep themselves ahead of the pack.
UPDATE: Scoble uses this news to build his case for Microsoft to buy Newsgator.
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.
Rod Boothby has been hard at work beating the corporate blogging drum where he works and part of his process has been to externalize his thinking on a blog set up specifically to generate awareness and test his ideas.
He’s thought long and hard about not only the benefits of creating a blogging culture at a company, he also has gone into quite a bit of detail on different approaches and sprinkled it with thinking about the cultural implications as well.
Rod’s been posting regularly since October and I would encourage anyone that is thinking about corporate blogging to subscribe to his feed. Here are some highlights from the past few months:
But my all time favorite innovation here is Rod’s concept of Enterprise Digg. The social bookmarking service blew onto the scene much like Slashdot in that important stories are submitted to the service by its members and then subsequent users “digg” the stories throughout the day. I became aware of digg.com from their diggnation podcast in which the founders of the service recount the past week’s top diggs over a few tins of their favorite beer.
Apply the social bookmarking aspect of digg.com to the enterprise and you have a service that serves many requirements that Rod alludes to in earlier posts. A social bookmarking service in which popular posts bubble up to the top is:
1. Social – collective linking behind the firewall gets everyone tuned into the news of the day without interruptive chatter.
2. Rewarding – if someone continually submits links that bubble up to the top, they will be recognized for their innovative vision and alignment with the interests of the company’s employees.
3. Fun – not to be forgotten, there’s a certain thrill at being the first to discover something no one else has seen. It’s the, “be the first on your block” syndrome applied to corporate culture.
4. Efficient – if you slice off the top 5% of diggs to the system, you very quickly filter out the noise and get to the most important opportunities and threats that face your company. No more email blasts from the CEO, no more soul searching corporate surveys, no more breakout session SWOT analysis flip charts. Set up a bookmarklet on your browser toolbar and bag-n-tag sites while you work and go back and review the aggregate on a monthly basis.
But why stop there. The only thing missing is that there needs to be a financial incentive to really drive this engine. Put some skin in the game and reward the top diggers, the people with the most votes on their pages.
Let’s take it a step further and have folks buy and sell shares in the top ideas. We had this issue every year in a company where I used to work. Every year all the open projects were gathered together for review and were matched against resources and over a painful 72 hour period, the project plans for the next 12 months were laid out and locked into place. It was increadibly frustrating for the project managers and stressful and highly political for those making the decision.
Why not pull out top ideas into a pool in which employees can place a portion of their virtual portfolio onto certain ideas. When those ideas get promoted into production there is an initial payout (as in an IPO) and as the profitability of the feature is measured over time, the payout would continue to pay dividends. This payout would act as a proxy for real money in order to base it in reality and, just as with the real world stock market, Product Manager and Senior Management would be restricted from the amount of trading they can do because of a conflict of interest.
Take a look at the Buzz Game on Yahoo! Research – we’re working with O’Reilly to use predictive markets to do just that.
Anyone who follows more than a couple of feeds in their reader has had this problem. Bolded numbers in brackets blinking back at you you, telling you how many articles you need to scan to stay current – do you click “read all” and be done with it? What if you miss something? How do you know what’s important when RSS normalizes everything to look the same?
Stowe Boyd of Corante points out how he feels,
I don’t like the Pez dispenser feel, where all posts are like another, and you assume the role of a pigeon in a Skinner box, hitting the button to make the pellets roll out.
RSS Readering: Why RSS Readers Are No Good For Me (And You, Too, I Bet)
Stowe not only gets the perfect analogy, he goes one better in his post and lays down a challenge for RSS readers to do better with some suggestions for improvement which I think make sense.
I think that’s the attraction of Memeorandum – we’re usually lazy and want to give over control to someone else to sort out the top news of the day. In Memorandum if a story is really talked about, it’ll remain the top story all day, there’s no worry in missing that one post, it’ll remain pegged up there until you’re ready for it. Reading your feeds (forgive me, I’m going to take a shot at my own analogy) should be more like taking in an expansive view of the landscape and not like weeding a garden. As Yahoo continues to think about how best to bring RSS to the masses, this is something we continue to think about.
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.