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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.'"
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.
No Sigs!
What you see there is the Public Relations Friendly(tm) version of the advertising plan you speak of...
When making a statement about such an acquisition, you don't say "The very clever thing about social software is that we can sell advertising at higher rates because we can tailor the ads to the market and promise more responsive viewing."
It's not that they are missing the point, it's that it doesn't sound very good to come out and say something that sounds so self-centered.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
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.
Is! exciting! news!
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?
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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!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
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.
This sig intentionally left justified.
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.