Ya who the hell are you anyway?
Webomatica made a point that's been lurking in the back of my mind for a while. They gave it legs.
What the hell is Yahoo anyway? People don't feel like they know.
Yahoo's situation should be watched by Google and others. Yahoo! has no real identification. Years ago, Yahoo! was the catalog of the internet. A filtered search engine that gave people the ability to make sense out of the growing Internet. Today, Yahoo! is a content provider. They have a lot of great holdings like Flickr, hotjobs, etc. They have Yahoo mail and Yahoo messenger which are highly used. But they don't have a central unifying theme.
They are becoming something we thought was dead with the bubble - a portal. When you access Yahoo.com you see a coherent list of services, a great initial screen, and the feel that a group of dedicated people are feverishly working to make the portal complete.
Yahooligans ask, "Why would you ever need to go anywhere but yahoo?"
The answer is simple ... because no one knows about Yahoo. Webomatica says:
My biggest issue with Yahoo is that I don’t really know what the heck
they’re up to. Every day when I fire up my browser, people are writing
about everybody else’s cool stuff (Apple, Google, Microsoft). This is
partly my own fault, but the message needs to become clearer and louder
- there’s no “buzz” from whatever Yahoo! is doing. When was the last
time you heard anybody called a “Yahoo fan boy”?
Why doesn't Yahoo! buzz? Is it because they don't send Mike Arrington enough squoosh balls and t-shirts?
As should not be surprising, I bring it back to game theory. The individual elements of Yahoo are great, but they are nothing together. Flickr was great, but it is an element. When I want Flickr, I go to Flickr.com, not photos.yahoo.com. Any gaming that's involved with Flickr is still branded Flickr and entirely contained within Flickr.
In order to create cohesion in applications within the Yahoo! domain, they will need to create gameable elements that cross application space. I don't know what the range of those might be, but I'll give Yahoo! the low hanging fruit here.
Amazon started their system that gave you half pi off your Amazon order if you used A9 a lot. There's no reason why Yahoo! couldn't do the same. You could build up Yahooey points that could be used for free Yahoo premium services or discounts on merchandise.
Having games that are enterprise-wide could bring excitement and coherence to the overall Yahoo offerings. This would go well beyond dashboards or widgets or other gizmodic crap that people keep trying to give us. The tech isn't the issue. Coherence is.
Google A, MSFT B, Yahoo C » Webomatica
Technorati Tags: yahoo, game theory, a9, amazon
powered by performancing firefox at Gray Hill Harbor Offices
The cool people at Yahoo proper who I know or who I've heard talk seem to be buried deep, deep within some system that tries very hard to keep them out of the public light. It's not that there's no personality there, just that it's apparently aggressively hidden.
Contrast this with recent and barely integrated Yahoo acquisitions of delicious, Flickr, or even upcoming.org where the personalities of those sites and those individuals seems to be intact.
I bemoan the loss of once-essential Yahoo tools like eGroups that has been systematically smothered by either neglect or random Yahoo foolishness. Yahoo Groups is still better by far that most alternatives, but they're currently hiring quickly to spiff it up, and I fear they're going to ruin it in the process.
Posted by: Edward | 21 October 2006 at 19:29
J Leroy I agree that if there was some unifying theme it would help with the synergy between all of Yahoo!'s different properties. It definitely feels like a lot of self-contained stores in a big Yahoo! mall.
Posted by: Webomatica | 31 October 2006 at 19:22