everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Work

  • Yahoo integrates RSS into Mail client

    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.

  • Original Content from Yahoo

    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.

  • Are we there yet?

    So if Microsoft and Yahoo are cross-linking their two IM networks and now AOL and Microsoft are set to announce a link up on Monday, does that mean that someone with Microsoft Messenger may be able to see both the AOL and Yahoo IM networks?

    We’ll have to wait for the conference call on Monday.

  • What’s going on at Yahoo?

    If you’re interested in reading up on what Yahoo! is thinking about, I encourage you to read these three pieces,

    I know it’s a bit rah, rah about my employer but I hope, after reading these, you get a sense of how exciting it is to be in the thick of things. As I talk to people around this company, the energy level and optimism of what can be built to improve the user experience is palpable.

  • Tag Cloud

    I’m playing around with Tag Cloud and put a large chunk of my OPML into it to see what all the blogs that I watch are talking about. Looks like there’s an unhealthy obsession with Google 😉

    I’ve been thinking a lot about how to creatively manage the flow of news that comes across and using ambient technology to aggregate and summarize. Jon Udell talks about a server log that chirps like a cricket if all is well. Extend this to have it bark like a dog if something needs looking at, it would be great to see these same principles on a meta-view of your RSS feeds. My colleague Russell Beattie has done some thinking on a feedback loop for readers to prioritize content and suggest related info. My other colleague Chad Dickerson goes into how Tag Cloud works (and got me into looking at Tag Cloud in the first place) and how it leverages Yahoo’s Term Extraction API to summarize the concepts in what the software has gathered.

    The Tag Cloud image above is a screenshot, the realtime image is here.

  • Yahoo to connect to TiVo

    Via the New York Times, Yahoo and TiVo announce that TiVo users will soon be able to access Yahoo information (Weather, Traffic) and Yahoo users will have shortcut to their TiVo from their personalized Yahoo television listings.. (I just checked and the link to add to your TiVo’s To Do recording list is already there!) I’ve been playing around with watching video clips that come through an RSS feed running off of Yahoo Video Search – it’d be cool to get this feed’s content piped into my TiVo. The TiVo’s remote is so much better suited for watching video than my laptop’s trackpad!

  • James Fallows on Yahoo & Social Media

    I was pleased to see this weekend’s piece in the New York Times by James Fallows attempting to get a vision of what is driving Yahoo innovation and scored the following quote from Jeff Weiner, Yahoo’s SVP of Search & Marketing,

    “You can look at the evolution of search as a play in three acts,” said Jeff Weiner, the senior vice president for search and marketing. “The first is the ‘public’ Web, where if different people type the same query they’ll all get the same results.” The second, he said, was purely personal search – finding a file or photo, usually on your own machine.

    “The third is the one that we are very interested in,” Mr. Weiner said. This is “social” or “community” searching, in which each attempt to find the right restaurant listing, medical advice site, vacation tip or other bit of information takes advantage of other people’s successes and failures in locating the same information.

    If you haven’t had a chance to play around with Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0 beta, check it out and create your own slice of the web with you and your community.

  • Put them in a box and keep ’em there.

    I really should go to bed as I’ve got an early commute tomorrow but I can’t stop playing with Think Tank.

    As a publicity stunt, Yahoo! Australia has put a few ad execs in a box and pointed a bunch of web cams at them as they scrum their way through ad campaign ideas for products submitted by users. It’s especially good fun because you can type messages and post pictures that will flash on a wall in Sydney seconds later. The real challenge is to then tune into the sound-enabled webcam to listen and see if you can get a reaction from two people in the room, on the other side of the world. I know what I’m doing with my son this weekend!

    From the site:

    Yahoo! Think Tank puts some of Australia and New Zealand’s leading creative minds under your control. Between the 3rd and 17th of November 2005, put this resource to work on any brief you can imagine, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Submit a brief online, control their working environment, judge their creative output and watch every minute of it live online.

    Need an idea for a pitch? Submit an idea.

  • Yahoo Maps Beta & Event Browser Mashup

    It’s out in the wild! I was floored when I first saw this and now I’m totally psyched to announce that Yahoo Maps is in beta with a spanking new interface. Be sure to check out the multi-point driving directions (useful when you’re picking up friends on the way to the mountains) and integration with local (type “pizza” in your home town and write a review of your favorite). As before, traffic conditions are just a click away (which is vital with my new commute) but Flash ads it in as a nice overlay.

    APIs you ask? But of course, not only AJAX but Flash! Chad Dickerson & Co. has already hacked together an innovative interface which uses Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Local APIs to “browse” events in a whole new way. Inspirational.

    More on Yahoo Search Blog, Jeremy Zawodny’s blog & Techcrunch.