A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company's search page will follow suit starting next month.
Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president for consumer experiences.
These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up.
"We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first."
The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo's effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo's profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft's online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.
Yahoo's new home page permits applications from Yahoo or others. This shows use of Facebook.
(Credit: Yahoo)The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user.
The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo's search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft's Bing, too. Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.
Long-coming changes
Newer Web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly.
Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo's. It began "bucket testing" it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert.
New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company's developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday. The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said. Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they'll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.
Yahoo's revamped front page.
(Credit: Yahoo)"The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback--tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn't," Bhat said. "It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and didn't."
The new home page will become default for others when beta testing is done "in the coming months," Yahoo said. The revamped search pages will enter bucket testing in August, meaning that users can't choose to use or not use the new design.
More changes
Opening up Yahoo's content to other sites' operations--and letting other sites use Yahoo data can use such as Facebook-like status updates--is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy. That effort, under way for well over a year, is designed to increase users' activity on Yahoo, to draw more people to Yahoo, and to make the company a better partner for advertisers.
There are about 60 applications available now, and more are being added daily, Bhat said. Users can create their own, too.
Also coming in August will be the ability to select what type of news people can see, with a slider that moves on a spectrum between "fun" and "serious," he said.
In addition, Yahoo is revamping its mobile site. One big feature: when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers, that customization will carry over to their mobile version.
Bhat wouldn't share details about whether the new home page fares better, either in terms of user engagement or revenue. However, because Yahoo plans to make its official home page announcement Tuesday while detailing second-quarter financial results, it's possible Bartz may be more forthcoming than Bhat.
Bhat did indicate, though, that things are moving in the right direction for the company.
"Our experience in our test indicates that people are excited about this home page. They feel this meets their needs and is fresh new look for Yahoo," Bhat said. "We are designing the page around users. What we do know when design page that users like, they tend to get more engaged."
Flickr lets you post image links to Twitter.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Yahoo has released a feature that lets people post Flickr photos to their Twitter accounts.
The Twitter2Flickr feature requires that you enable Flickr as an approved application that can tweet under your username.
Then, when you click the "blog this" link above a photo at Flickr, you're presented with the option to twitter it. The tweet will come with a "flic.kr" shortened URL.
Flickr has a large number of users, and its use is amplified by the fact that other sites can make use of Flickr data through an API (application programming interface). The Twitter integration is a modest example of Yahoo's attempt to make its sites less of a walled garden by working better with other Web properties.
A Twitter search for Flickr photographs indicates that a lot of people are making use of the integration, which had been in beta testing since earlier in June.
New applications for Yahoo Mail, such as this one from PayPal, let you send money right from your inbox without having to visit PayPal's site.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo has added new applications for its users in another step toward giving its users more and more to do from within Yahoo.
The company plans to announce the limited beta of three new Yahoo Mail applications from PayPal, Picnik, and Zumo Drive on Friday. Yahoo Mail users who have indicated an interest in signing up for Yahoo's beta programs will be the first to get a crack at the new services, with the applications coming to the wider user base over the next several months.
It's all part of Yahoo's Open Strategy, designed to let outside developers tap into the company's properties and offer their wares inside Yahoo's network of sites. It's becoming an old story, but the trend these days in the Internet world is the proliferation of large sites like Yahoo, Google, and Facebook as development platforms unto themselves, with application developers spending more and more time writing programs that run on those sites, rather than traditional operating systems.
For example, PayPal's application will let Yahoo Mail users send money to another user by opening a window like a tab in a browser. Picnik, a popular browser-based photo editing tool, will bring that feature to Yahoo Mail in a similar way, letting you open the service right from an e-mail message.
Yahoo is also expanding the Open Strategy to other parts of its portfolio of sites. Wordpress bloggers will be able to post to their blogs from their MyYahoo page, and manage their money with Mint.com's services. And Yahoo TV Widgets will now support searching and viewing of archrival Google's YouTube video collection.
It's taken Yahoo quite some time to put these applications together, first announcing the Yahoo Open Strategy in April 2008 but not taking it live until last December, when it unveiled the first set of applications for Yahoo Mail and the MyYahoo start page. It also appears the company plans to wrap these applications along with forthcoming ones into a redesign of its homepage, which CEO Carol Bartz said this week would arrive "later this fall."
The idea is convenience: letting users get everything they need and want in one place. But the upshot is that by providing incentives to stick around on Yahoo, the company is making it more likely that you'll stumble upon something else at Yahoo, such as an ad or another service that drives a search query: 98 percent of Yahoo's searches come from people who are already on the site.
Yahoo has fired up a major part of its Yahoo Open Strategy, the ability to broadcast blog postings, tweets, photo uploads, Yelp reviews, and other activity to members of your online social circle.
The change to Yahoo Updates makes the company potentially more competitive with services such as FriendFeed and Facebook, which do much the same thing, though they also offer to show activity on other services including Amazon, Digg, and Google Reader.
Yahoo Update lets you sign up to broadcast activity from various online services. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)Offering the 21 third-party services helps with part of Yahoo's chicken-and-egg problem; the other half is actually attracting people to use it. Yahoo has hundreds of millions of active users, but they haven't been trained to use Yahoo for social-networking tasks.
Yahoo can show activity from 34 of its own online properties, but some obvious candidates--for example Flickr for photo sharing and commentary and Delicious for bookmark sharing--aren't yet available. "Updates from (Yahoo) Buzz, Music, and TV you can share. For other services, we are building out the number of Updates sources as quickly as we can," said spokeswoman Lucy Chung.
Yahoo Open Strategy is a major part of Yahoo's effort to retool for a new era in Internet use. It was left behind by several start-ups, but is hoping it will be able to catch up by energizing its large membership.
Other parts of the Yahoo Open Strategy include letting others rejigger search results through BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), presenting specific search results more elaborately through SearchMonkey, adding online applications on Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, and Yahoo.com front page, and revamping Flickr to spotlight social connections.
If successful, Yahoo will get more users as well as more activity and loyalty from existing users. That will let the company sell more and perhaps better ads as well.
For details on how to use the new options, check Yahoo's blog posting on the subject.
Yahoo is proud of new features it began rolling into its online mail service this week, but some users had troubles with the upgrade.
"We found that some people were prevented from accessing the new social features in mail today for a short period of time," spokeswoman Karen Mahon said Thursday. "We have fixed the issue, so people should not have any issues with the new features."
The upgrade adds social features and six applications into Yahoo Mail. (Check our Yahoo Open Strategy gallery for a guided tour of some new features.) For example, people can sort their in-box to show only messages from their contacts, and applications can be used to show all photos in a person's mail archive.
"I have been unable to access my mail since I opened this page to find out what this new application was all about. I am not happy!!!" posted one commenter on Yahoo's announcement. And David Cassel said in an e-mail to CNET News that he also was affected: "Instead of upgrading Yahoo's mail, they broke it!"
Those who've signed up for a new Yahoo profile will get the social features, but only power users were invited to test the applications element, Yahoo said. The applications beta test will be broadened to more people "over the coming months."
Updated 2:56 p.m. PST with further details.
SAN FRANCISCO--After months of preamble, Yahoo on Monday flipped the on switch for a massive project to increase activity--and advertising--on its Internet sites through social connections and online applications.
The company has been working mostly behind the scenes to build what it calls the Yahoo Open Strategy, but now the strategy's changes will become evident to U.S. users of some of Yahoo's main properties such as Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, and Yahoo's music and TV sites. In addition, the company will begin previewing a new Yahoo Toolbar later this week.
John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)"We wanted to establish a social dimension," Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo's audience products division, said of the Yahoo Open Strategy goals. And to attract programmers who can build applications on Yahoo properties, "We wanted to engage with the developer community and to open up the power of Yahoo's products and platforms."
Yahoo Mail, which according to ComScore has about 275 million active users each month, gets some significant changes, with more to come. First is a new welcome page that now spotlights messages from people in a person's Yahoo social network and invitations from others to join their networks. And the in-box page now includes a new "from connections" button that shows e-mail only from those social connections.
Second is the arrival of online applications tied to Yahoo Mail. One inaugural program from Xoopit lets you view all the photos in your e-mail archive, even expanding links to online galleries. Another lets you convert an e-mail message into a WordPress blog post in two clicks.
"The opening of the mail platform is a huge benefit to users in terms of the additional forms of sharing and communication we can build in and to the developers who can build applications," said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, speaking to reporters at a launch event here.
More mail changes are coming, he said. Among them will be birthday reminders and the ability to exchange large files, Kremer said.
The new mail abilities require a the cooperation of Yahoo users' contacts: they must agree to be listed as your contact before they can become a part of Yahoo social activities. That's because of privacy considerations, Kremer said. For example, the right-hand side of the new Yahoo Mail welcome page also shows contacts' activity such as photos posted, movies recommended, or applications added, and that's information those people might not want to share with just anyone.
Yahoo Mail's new welcome page spotlights activity from a person's social connections. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)
Leapfrogging the Joneses
It's not all fun and games. Building use of Yahoo into members' social lives and letting them use applications housed on Yahoo sites means more advertising for Yahoo. That was important earlier this year when the company was stagnating financially, but it's even more important now that the recession has put extreme pressure on the ad market. And Patel believes the ads that can be delivered with the social context--for example clicking on the Yahoo Music page for an album a friend just rated highly--will provide valuable context for advertisers.
"Targeted (ad) inventory sells better than untargeted inventory," Patel said.
The Yahoo Open Strategy theoretically could help Yahoo not just keep up with the Joneses, but leapfrog them. Although Yahoo capitalized on the first generation of online social activity, e-mail and instant messaging, it lagged rivals such as Facebook when it comes to letting people build online communities of friends and business contacts. Yahoo's new strategy, though, is tuned to its own assets.
Google has got a powerful search engine, but its online community is nascent compared to Yahoo's. Facebook and MySpace have got social ties, but not Yahoo's breadth of finance, sports, entertainment, news, and communications. Yahoo Open Strategy is a recipe not easily reproduced in full by Yahoo competitors.
The hard part will be bringing the transformation to fruition fast enough.
For the Yahoo Open Strategy to pay off, the company must encourage its members to register new profiles and to link their friends into their social network. And it will have to coax a lot of programmers to build good applications then coax Yahoo members to activate them. All this takes time, and Yahoo, with Microsoft and Google breathing down its neck, doesn't have the luxury of time.
Getting people to sign up for yet another social service--Yahoo strenuously objects to calling its work just another social network--is another hurdle.
"There is going to be some fatigue on that process," Kremer said of people getting inundated with a new round of online service invitations. "It may slow down the virality of what we're doing."
But the company believes it will spread because people will find it useful. And unlike some services, Yahoo hopes people only set up their service with a small number of important contacts rather than compete for the biggest networks.
"I don't want my users to sign up for 500 connections," Kremer said. "I want this to be for the tight inner circle--those five or ten or fifteen people they scan for" when checking their in-box.
Yahoo Mail is getting a Flickr application that lets people upload photos from the e-mail application. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)
Other changes
The Yahoo Mail change is one of a host announced Monday. Among others:
• Yahoo also announced changes to its customizable home page, My Yahoo, that lets people add applications and customize the page's appearance. For example, Yahoo showed a wine-themed page with its own background and content.
• A new toolbar for Web browsers also gets drop-down interactivity that can show what a person's contacts are doing, what e-mail has been received, and other information. A preview version of the toolbar will be available later this week for download.
• Yahoo's media properties can spotlight contacts' activities, such as when they assign a five-star ranking to a particular song. "Our media properties monetize really well," Patel said.
SAN FRANCISCO--Phase one came last week, when Yahoo launched its new profiles site. Phase two begins next week, when Web developers can start sinking their teeth into Yahoo's attempt to replace its present static design with one that's customizable, application-rich, socially connected, and woven into other parts of the Internet.
Developers are essential to what the company calls the Yahoo Open Strategy. Yahoo is building the foundation, but it will be the arrival of others' applications that will show whether Yahoo's transformation attempt is fulfilling those hopes.
Ash Patel, head of Yahoo's Audience Products Division
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)"That starts changing Yahoo from a walled garden to the best of the Web," said Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo's Audience Product Division, speaking to reporters at Yahoo's Brickhouse site here Friday. Patel has a heavy burden: in his new role, he's responsible for a major part of Yahoo's attempt to reverse its fortunes amid a rough economy.
If the strategy works, more people will use Yahoo, and they'll use it more deeply. "We should see a lot more time spent and bigger engagement with the front page and mail and My Yahoo," Patel said. "The average Yahoo user who may use two or three things (today) will now start using four or five or six things."
Applications using the Yahoo foundation can run at Yahoo or outside it, and Yahoo will release a software developer kit to help programmers get started.
For example, when a commenter is posting on a publisher's Web site, the publisher could offer the commenter an option to have that activity broadcast on his stream of activity on Yahoo. That would let the commenter share what he's up to with his contacts while exposing the publisher's site to more potential readers.
Another example--indeed, the winner of the Yahoo Open Hack 2008 programming contest augmented Yahoo Mail to present all photos a person has sent or received into photo albums. More photos are shared daily on Yahoo than are uploaded to the company's Flickr photo-sharing site, Patel said, so moves like this could open new windows of activity on Yahoo properties.
New developer tools
Yahoo has opened some developer-oriented projects already, notably BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) for repackaging Yahoo search results, and SearchMonkey for adding new depth and pizzazz to Yahoo's search results, but those were narrower in scope. At some point next week--Yahoo won't promise which day exactly--the more powerful tools will go live at the Yahoo Developer Network.
Neal Sample, Yahoo's chief architect for platforms
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)There are three broad categories of technology that developers will get access to next week. At the base is a social platform that applications can use to draw upon Yahoo users' social connections--as long as users have given permission. While sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace capitalized on the social-networking phenomenon, Yahoo argues that it already has the social data built into its properties. It's now a matter of bringing it to the fore so applications and users can draw on that information.
"The idea is to create a single social experience that can be shared," said Jay Rossiter, head of the Yahoo Open Strategy.
One oft-cited example is a revamped Yahoo Mail that spotlights mail from people's close contacts. If you spend a lot of time e-mailing your boyfriend, mom, or college roommate, chances are you'll want to know when they e-mail back.
One level above the social plumbing is the foundation for running applications, called the Yahoo Application Platform. Initially, Yahoo will house standalone applications, but as third parties' products mature, they'll also be able to run on Yahoo users' profile pages, My Yahoo pages, and other locations. Some will even run on the Yahoo.com home page, as long as they can meet tough requirements for high performance.
This diagram shows various components developers can use to work with the Yahoo Open Strategy.
(Credit: Yahoo)And the third level is the services level. Here, Yahoo provides the Yahoo Query Language, a close relative to the Structured Query Language many use to extract data from databases. YQL is designed to make it easier for programmers to extract and process data from Yahoo and many other Web sites, and Yahoo says it'll do the heavy lifting to make the data workable through YQL.
Overshare?
Of course, users might get the willies thinking about just how much their own activity is becoming part of the information flow of the Internet. Do you really want an application sharing what you do with your friends or indeed the entire world?
Yahoo doesn't want any privacy surprises, though. Each new application must declare to the user exactly what Yahoo services it wants to use and must obtain the users' permission to do so through a "scary" warning screen: the more services, the more exclamation mark alerts are shown--an interface designed to encourage developers to use the bare minimum and to ensure that users know what they're getting into, said Neal Sample, Yahoo's chief architect for platforms.
"Yahoo's going to put up essentially another skull and crossbones" for each service the application uses, Sample said.
And users will have fine control over what's shared or not. People will be able to broadcast what music they're listening to publicly while confining their movie habits only to close friends, for example.
Some socially connected services will require signed-in participation from both a Yahoo user and outsiders. For example, a person could selectively share photos without making them public, and those viewing the photos would have to sign in. Today, such a move requires that all people be Yahoo members, but the company will add a fast, lightweight registration process that can use any e-mail address.
Yahoo, of course, hopes receiving invitations from Yahoo members effectively will upsell those outsiders to Yahoo services. "It's valuable for Yahoo to have a way to draw more users into Yahoo," Rossiter said.
Update 12:41 p.m. PDT: I corrected a reference that should have been to Yahoo.
Yahoo has begun sharing some future plans it has for Groups, its service where people with shared interests can get together online through mailing lists, calendars, polls, and other features.
In the "coming year," Yahoo plans to add many attributes that expand the scope of groups, according to the Yahoo Groups blog on Tuesday. Those features include tools for product reviews, service directories, wanted boards, address books, and event planners.
And upgrades to existing features include: a better system for hosting photos that permits more storage and larger pictures; better message boards; the ability to store e-mail attachments; and the ability to set the site for non-English languages.
There's no official word about whether there will be room for some of the sharing and collaboration that's coming with Yahoo Open Strategy on Groups, but it seems possible to me. For example, hosting OpenSocial widgets that are available to members of the group seems a natural fit.
Yahoo already has launched a Groups Lab, a team that creates new features such as the recently released People Map beta test that shows group members' locations on a map.
Fulfilling a second major part of its promise to make the internal workings of its Web site more extroverted, Yahoo is opening the interface for its address book for outside use.
The move could mean that Yahoo, struggling under business pressures but still a stronghold of Web activity, could become more tightly tied to others' Web services. For example, a programmer starting up a social networking site could use the interface to send invitations to a member's list of contacts stored at Yahoo.
"Our address book has for a long time been one of the top things developers wanted access to," said Chris Yeh, head of the Yahoo Developer Network. That's because, over the years, Yahoo users have filled it with billions of individual records.
Yahoo users have stored more than 500 million address books, and the service is used by more than 150 million unique users each month, Yeh said. "A lot of our address books (are) constantly being updated. It's one of the biggest sources of contact information on the Web," he said.
Opening the address book API (application programming interface) is the second major step taken so far in executing the Yahoo Open Strategy that Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh announced in April. The first step, in May, was opening the SearchMonkey project so outside coders could make more creative use of Yahoo search results.
"The address book is the second proof point. This year, we'll show proof point after proof point," Yeh said.
Yahoo Open Strategy is an attempt to link the company more with other Internet activities rather than remain a sealed-off, if sprawling, Internet domain. Through its open strategy, the company envisions outside programmers building Web applications on Yahoo's site, Yahoo services being incorporated into outside applications, and social connection information within Yahoo being used more widely.
Whether Yahoo will succeed in capturing developer attention and becoming a more dynamic part of new developments remains to be seen. A lot of action--some complementary but much of it competitive--also is taking place at rivals such as Facebook, Google, and any number of small Web 2.0 start-ups.
From the outside looking in
The address book move means outside Web sites will be able to read and write address book information--if a user grants permission through a Yahoo authorization process.
A site with a gift registry could piggyback on the address book so that a person could tell contacts about a wish list of presents, for example, Yeh said. Or a site shipping packages to others could auto-complete the address fields on a Web form.
(And something I'd like to see happen: somebody please endow the address book with an interface that doesn't look like it dates from 1998. I have a lot of contacts stored away in the Yahoo address book, and I find it excruciating to update addresses, scrub out obsolete e-mail addresses, or update mailing lists.)
Explicitly opening the service is more secure than one alternative today, in which a third-party site asks a user for Yahoo log-in credentials so it can access the site and scrape the contact information.
"There's no control over what happens after a user gives that (username and password). The third party could use it to log in to mail or any other part of Yahoo," Yeh said. "It's not a real secure method."
Yahoo isn't opening up the interface for an address book creation, though, which means it won't at least for now be usable as a generic back end for a Web site's address book needs.
Social graph theft?
One interesting possibility raised by the openness is whether an outside company might use it to steal, in effect, a user's social graph--the collection of connections each user often must laboriously reproduce as he or she joins a new site. Social graphs are a key asset of Web sites with a social element, in part because it's hard to reproduce them elsewhere. So once a user constructs one, there's a strong incentive to remain loyal to a site.
Yahoo isn't concerned about that, in part because opening the interface will mean other sites will be able not only to extract contact information from Yahoo, but also to synchronize changes on their sites back with Yahoo, Yeh said.
"I don't think we're worried about losing control over our social graph. All the things we're doing now are trying to break down some of the traditional walls Yahoo has had to the outside world," he said. "Yes, absolutely some of our data will get pulled out and be used for benefit of other systems. (But) when people use our system address book APIs, there's just as much a chance somebody will load something back into our network."
One company making use of the Yahoo address book interface is Plaxo, which hosts 40 million users' address books already.
Yahoo itself maintains multiple social graphs--for example, the address book, the Yahoo Messenger buddy lists, and the Flickr lists of contacts, friends, and family.
"Not all this data is combined yet," Yeh said, though one key part of Yahoo Open Strategy is to unify these contact lists and the related user profile pages. "The goal of the next half year is to make sure we bring that together."
The Yahoo address book is the "place we like people to store all their contact information," he said, but it's not a terribly rich social graph. For example, it doesn't currently have a good way to distinguish which contacts would be appropriate to invite to a new social service or to receive gift registry notifications.
"One of the things that we have to do is give users and opportunity to activate their social graph a little bit--essentially, to make sure they can classify the people they're most interested in communicating with on a regular basis so we know how to create a social environment around them," Yeh said.
"Going forward, we'll have to have a better solution for people so we can classify inside our address book who we're closest to and who are at further distance from us," he added. "That's a function of the social work we're doing."
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