Om reports from a Yahoo retreat (I wanted to go, but had a school board meeting, sounds like it was really interesting!).
My contention is that forget search, because Yahoo has something better than that.
My.Yahoo.Com is no longer a portal page, but instead an “attention page” which can be and should be leveraged to become the aggregator site for complicated digital life.
I consider search the interface for all this, in fact. Om also notes that Yahoo’s new Chief Product Officer, Ash Patel, is a recent Mac convert.
Yahoo is definitely trailing, but I feel that part of the reason is that Google just has incredible buzz. My friends are all using GoogleTalk now despite using Yahoo Messenger previously just because it’s from Google. They have Google Desktop just sitting there and never use it. It’s really incredible how people use whatever Google puts out.
But I’m digressing. Yahoo My Web is another “my” feature which is really impoving their search. I like that anytime I search for something I can just add it to My Web for sharing. If Yahoo can keep getting people to sign up for my.yahoo they’ll continue to do well. I spend tons of time there reading headlines, checking stocks, and clicking on my rss feeds. If I lost the page I’d be royally screwed.
Its amazing why people miss Terry Semel’s – and Sue Weber’s – repeated assertions that Search is not really the biggest piece of yahoo. Yahoo keeps putting the ‘my’ in search, music, messenger, syndicating content. There are many non-geeks who don’t know RSS but use my.yahoo’s RSS syndication. These are the same folks who use my.yahoo.com for checking local cinema listings, temperatures and stocks.
But, yahoo has to add some sexi-ness to the my.yahoo brand. Of course, its easier said than done. It also needs to make it a little more ‘technical’. For example, their ‘deals of the day’ personalization keeps pushing random stuff that and seems to be the least personalized and static stuff that they have. I would think shopping would be a prime candidate to personalize!
As mentioned above it really is all aout the buzz. Google seem to have the midus touch at the moment, everything they release gets into the news, is talked about on hundreds and thousands of blogs and message boards around the web and theres just no stopping them.
Its hard to see how Yahoo can compete, I think they have had their day and we are indeed seeing the decline.
Here is a long, interesting Profile and Critique of Terry Semel by the New York Times – Today….
The writer analyses his preceeding career and the controversial reaction of Y! to his joining
nytimes.com/2006/01/29/business/yourmoney/29yahoo.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print