On Yahoo!'s Acquisitions

Barry Norton writes "The Guardian has quite an insightful article about recent Yahoo acquisitions Delicious and Flickr. They quote Joshua Schachter, Delicious' creator: 'We're excited to be working with the Yahoo search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin, Flickr!' And why Yahoo's interest? The article opines: 'It takes a lot of the hard work out of searching the web. The very clever thing about social software is that it puts the burden on to the user, not the provider.'"

Comments

wrong idea about Social Networks and search

[ChrisGilliard]

It takes a lot of the hard work out of searching the web. The very clever thing about social software is that it puts the burden on to the user, not the provider.

If this is how Yahoo sees it, they're missing the point. Yahoo (and other web-portals) can use Social Networks to learn more about their users. For instance, a certain social circle may all be members of a bowling league, so maybe show bowling ball advertisers to people that have a direct connection with the bowling league circle. The connection I see is more in delivering more appropriate content to users, not saving money on search.

Re:wrong idea about Social Networks and search

[BandwidthHog]

I don’t see that as a way to save money on search, but more as a way to offer a different kind of search or, in trendy parlance, to make searches more relevant. Basically what you’re doing with the whole user tagging thing is getting a bunch of human brains to categorize things for you, and the structure of the system causes those brains to only work on parts of the system that they personally give a damn about. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the infrastructure needed to sustain that is actually more expensive in the long term than large clusters of servers calculating PageRank or some other algorithm.

So how long...

[User 956]

So how long until Yahoo changes their name from Del.icio.us to "Yahoo Social Bookmarking Service", just like they changed Konfabulator to "Yahoo Widget Engine", Oddpost to "Yahoo Mail" and Launch.com to "Yahoo Music"...?

Re:So how long...

[scsscs]

Yahoo wont change the name. Unlike Konfabulator and Oddpost, which were acquired for their technology, Del.icio.us, like Flickr, was acquired for its community. The name is an important part of the community. I do suspect that eventually Yahoo will merge logins with Del.icio.us like they did with Flickr, and that Del.icio.us data will find its way into other Yahoo services, but other than that I think Yahoo will be hands off and support Joshua Schachter's vision of what the site should be.

That's just part of it..

[Lysol]

Sure, social networks can mine users data and habits, that's a big deal. But I'm sure Yahoo gets that. But don't underestimate having an army of users doing your work for you. I've worked for companies that would have killed to have users doing their work for them in this way. In fact, it's almost a sure thing to say that future 'content providers' will employ more of this along with AI and not have many companies employees - if any - touching any of the input data. As a programmer, sounds good to me..

Re:That's just part of it..

[cei]

Not like this is particularly new for Yahoo... when they first started out as just a web directory, most of the source of their portal was from user submissions, not crawling & indexing. In many ways, del.icio.us is a throwback to the early days for Yahoo, replacing hierarchal categories with tags.

Re:They bought it...

[Phanatic1a]

I'm far less concerned about their changing the name then about them completely ruining what made the original company worth purchasing in the first place.

Launch.com was great, until Yahoo took it over and made it completely fucking useless and annoying.

Yahoo and Google

[mister_llah]

Why is it that when Google makes a purchase, it is lauded as a brilliant idea... ... and when Yahoo makes a purchase, it is bashed and made to be a horrible thing?

===

Can someone explain this to me, and in a way that doesn't involve singular instances... a broad spectrum view of why so many people are so keen on Google and so unkeen on Yahoo...

I'd really like to know!

Re:Yahoo and Google

[tommers]

And while I was very outraged when I first read about Yahoo and the Chinese journalists, I found it much harder to fault Yahoo when I found out that the warrant did not have any information about the accusation. It could have been to track down a murderer, terrorist, or pedophile or it could have a Chinese kid wearing a shirt saying "My government are meanies". Its much harder to expect a company to deny the police information just because they don't like every single crime that country accuses people of. Yahoo! is big enough that they should take a stand when they know what the issue is, but besides leaving China entirely, given what I know now, I can't imagine how Google could have acted the least bit differently.

Re:Yahoo and Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo! is a portal, not just a search engine. If you want to compare Google to Yahoo!'s site, pick a comparible branch of Google:

www.yahoo.com vs. news.google.com

Both cluttered with crap I can't be arsed reading there because I can get it skewed and triple-fisted on SlashDot instead.

Comparing Yahoo!'s search site to Google is a little more even:
search.yahoo.com vs. www.google.com

Re:Yahoo and Google

[ramsj900]

1)With google products I always feel like they designers are on my side of the equation trying to make my web experience I want to use google to enhance. Yahoo always feels like they are ramming content...any content if I will just spend 5 more minutes on their site. 2)Yahoo's convoluted entanglement of pages and half-baked, half-operating, offerings seem like the same old shit, not even dressed up in a pretty package. Google rolls out stuff that is cool and different in an attempt to address how users actually view the web. Yeah google has AdSense, but they don't try to hide it or apologize for the ad placements. To me it is like TV...I ignore 98% of the ads that don't apply to me. Yahoo weaves the sponsorship into the content and who knows what is content or marketing let alone everything I ever am interested in checking out has an up-charge attached. Let the frickin sponsors pay my way and build it in to the cost of the product over time. 3) Finally...yahoo mail = 789 spam emails a day (for real!) Gmail = 3 spams, and they are from sites I actually visited once. WTF

Re:Yahoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

Google started search? No.
Google started free email? No.
Google started newsgroups? No.
Google started analytics? No.
Google started online advertising? No.
Google started satelite maps? No.
Google started blogging? No.
Google started toolbars? No.

The only innovative thing Google has done is convince the masses a corporation is unable to do evil. And that's only innovative because nobody else has succeeded at it before.

Re:Yahoogle

[tjr]

Indeed, Google didn't invent any of those things, but they sure made them better. Substantially better, in some cases. Google is known for having a lot of scientists on staff, and they likely do a lot of original CS research to make things better, but they also must have a lot of really good HCI people who know how to design interfaces, and a lot of really good engineers who know how to actually build usable software.

Yahoo HomePage is TOO BUSY.

[Anonymous Coward]

They keep adding more and more stuff into the Yahoo page
but it justs looks too busy.

Google - damn - the logo, the search box, some small print.
Sweet Perfection!

Google could do something to clean up those page designs.

And drop any useless graphics and go easy on the advertisements.
Especially moving GIF, Flash, talking video ads with sound, etc.
Ads that complex are just annoying, not encouraging business.

Re:Innovation vs Improvement

[tjr]

As long as Google continues to make sure it's web services are the best versions (the best webmail, the best ad utilities, the best search, etc.), then people will continue to use them. Even if Google never innovated anything else, but just continued to maintain their current product line, I suspect that they would be a profitable company as long as people are using the Web. But is Google really not an innovator? I think they are. They are currently into micro-innovation: they come up with lots of little, well-implemented ideas to make existing ideas better. We've had webmail for years, but I never liked it. I stuck with my POP3 desktop clients. It wasn't until I used GMail that I found webmail good enough to use over the likes of Thunderbird. Google's webmail makeover wasn't macro-innovation; it was still a webmail service, providing essentially the same functionality as hundreds of others. But it was micro-innovation: a bunch of minor tweaks and improvements to make the webmail experience a lot better than it was before.

You can bet your ass, they will

[User 956]

And just like with Flickr, when the Yahoo business weasels force everyone to get a Yahoo login, it's going to piss of a heck of a lot of people. How's that for suporting the "community" that they just paid a big chunk of good money for?