The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!

Written by Lidija Davis / October 18, 2008 5:01 AM

At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara today, Dave Beckett (principal software architect at Yahoo!) and Tom Hughes-Croucher (technical evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network), answered questions about the recent consumer release of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and discussed digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Future_of_Web_3_0_According_to_Yahoo’;digg_bgcolor = ‘#ffffff’;digg_skin = ‘normal’;the company’s future plans to open up almost everything.

“The open source, hacker attitude has been part of our culture for so long; now we’re opening up the different pieces,” Hughes-Croucher told the packed room yesterday. “We’re taking data from across our sites and sharing it.”

Dubbed the ‘rewiring of Yahoo,’ Y!OS 1.0 launched this week with the introduction of the social suite. Its strategy focuses on opening up almost everything to developers, including content, traffic, and Yahoo’s user base.

Y!OS: What It Means to Developers

When asked what type of data will be available to developers, Hughes-Croucher said that Yahoo’s strength is in historical data which can be accessed, assessed, and used to make the user experience better; the caveat of course is: with the users permission.

“If we use this data and grid computing to process the data, we don’t need to ask you to import your address book – we already know that information,” added Beckett. “At the end of the day though, this is your data.”

But it’s not just about user data, he says, search data is coming into it as well, via searchmonkey.

To make things simple for everyday developers, the Yahoo! duo told the audience they are concentrating on APIs for sites like Flickr and Delicious. “Of course, there are other technologies, like Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), the next generation of Yahoo Pipes, that brings ease of use to query language,” says Hughes-Croucher….

Yahoo and Google Moving on Social Media; Microsoft Stalks to Buy

Ed: Yahoo and Google moving with small changes to integrate social media features. Microsoft talks about Windows 7 and buying Yahoo. 

Yahoo Profile is another effort by Yahoo to create circle’s of friends. Past efforts include 360, myBlogLog, FlickR, and others. Too little, too late.

Google has integrated gReader and iGoogle. Past efforts to share these personal pages with friends have not received much buzz. 

Go Get Yer Shiny New Yahoo Profile…And Make Some Connections!

by Michael Arrington on October 16, 2008

Yahoo begins the rollout of its new user profile today, which marks the first tangible product release for the social part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS. The profile is one of the anchors (mail is the other) to Yahoo’s strategy of turning the site into one big social network.

It’s been a long haul for the company, which first talked about the new strategy almost a year ago. More details, and a few conceptual screenshots, were announced at CES in January. A newcomer to Yahoo, VP Communities Jim Stoneham (he joined six weeks ago), is leading the team that’s creating new social features.

So here’s exactly what Yahoo is launching today: 

Google Updates iGoogle: Better Integration with Google Reader, Gmail, and Google Finance

Google today updated its iGoogle homepage by improving its integration Google Reader, Gmail, and Google Finance. These gadgets can now make use of iGoogle’s canvas feature, which allows a gadget to take up the whole screen. This is especially useful for the Google Reader and Gmail gadgets, which now bring almost all of the features of the actual services to iGoogle.

iGoogle Goes Wide, Introduces Canvas Pages.

by Erick Schonfeld on October 16, 2008

Google’s startpage, iGoogle, is spreading its wings. Today it is rolling out a new design that shifts tabs to a column on the left so that more Google gadgets and sources of content can be accommodated. But the biggest change is the ability for content partners and developers to expand each gadget to take up nearly the whole page.

Partners that are launching with expanded gadgets include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, TV Guide, iLike, CurrentTV, and Go Comics. Google itself has created extra-wide gadgets for Google Reader, Gmail, Google Finance, and YouTube. If you have an iGoogle page in the U.S., you should see the new design rolled out by the end of the day.

In effect, Google is stealing a page from Facebook here and giving Gadget developers their own canvas pages. Within these iFrames, an entire Website can be exposed, with ads and all. Any money from ads on the canvas page go 100 percent to the content partner…

Yahoo SearchMonkey gets Zagat, CitySearch

from CNET News.com | Tech news blog

Trying to reclaim a lead lost to Google, Yahoo is repackaging some search results with extra information. New business review Web sites have joined the effort.

Yahoo-AOL: An integration nightmare on deck

Ed: We’ve noted the execution challenges for Yahoo and AOL. The combination creates a nightware that is multiplicatively worse. 400 engineers at Yahoo combined with equal numbers from AOL – like the elections – it’s a cacophony of voices without clear leadership. Dangerous.

Boomtown’s Kara Swisher reports:

Now, sources tell me, the circle of executives at both companies interfacing with each other has been widened, for purposes of due diligence. That includes Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who is indeed in New York this week–where AOL parent, Time Warner, is located–to meet once again with its CEO Jeff Bewkes and see if they can actually complete the merger.

Swisher then has a strong analysis on the management teams and how they might fit together. Henry Blodget tosses in the financial analysis(assuming Yahoo shares can hold it together long enough to do a deal). But once the headlines are dry and all the moving parts are dissected the real work begins. How are these assets and information systems going to be combined?

Something tells me Michael Krigsman at IT failures is going to be busy.

Why the pessimism?

Yahoo in April outlined its open strategy, which is about collapsing its internal data silos as much as it is about becoming a platform. Simply put, Yahoo has its share of applications running amok since its various business units used to run more or less independently.

Now toss in AOL’s assets. AOL was built via acquisition and each company acquired–Bebo, Advertising.com, Quigo etc.–all had their own information systems. Now take that hodge-podge and connect it at the hip to Time Warner’s systems. Talk about legacy apps.

Once you map the various IT systems and their connections at AOL and Yahoo you’ll have some ugly whiteboard art.

But all of that mess is behind the scenes. You can pretend that rat’s nest doesn’t exist–at least for a while.

What about the advertising systems?

• Yahoo brings RightMedia, APT, BlueLithium and Panama.
• AOL brings Platform-A and its subsidiaries– TACODA LLC, Quigo Technologies, ADTECH AG, Third Screen Media, Advertising.com and Perfiliate Limited.

Adding those ad networks together will get share, but can Yahoo-AOL integrate them in a way that works for advertisers?

Simply put, the Microsoft-Yahoo integration looked cleaner.

The ad networks and internal systems are just two of the most obvious pain points. The actual management teams that will carry out the integration are another issue (many projects fail due to inept management instead of technology).

A Yahoo-AOL combination is going to lead to a management bakeoff internally. And unfortunately, Yahoo and AOL are used to it. How many reorgs have occurred in the last two years at both places?

Toss in the fact that neither AOL or Yahoo are exactly running to the altar. They are being pushed together. Yahoo is trying to keep its stock price from heading to single digits and Time Warner just wants to unload AOL to anyone it can.

Add it up and you don’t have the makings for a smooth integration process

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

Yahoo Email Dominates Web-Mail Landscape, but Losing Mindshare to Social Networks

Yahoo Email Dominates Web-Mail Landscape

Yahoo’s email service dominates the web-mail market with the highest number of email users, monthly minutes spent per user and times users check mail, according to data from comScore(via a New York Times blog post by reporter Saul Hansell.) 

AOL’s email also appears to be holding its own with its user numbers, while Gmail is increasing its number of users but lagging behind other web-mail providers in how often users check mail and how much time they spend on the site.

Among the findings:

• Yahoo leads in email users, with 88.4 million in August 2008, according to comScore. Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail has 45.2 million users, AOL has 44.8 million, and Google’s Gmail has 26.0 million.

• Yahoo mail users spend the most time (286 minutes/month) reading their email, Gmail users spend the least (82 minutes), with AOL and Microsoft in the middle (229 and 204 minutes, respectively).

• Google users check their email the least – 13.6 times on average in August, while Yahoo users visited 18.8 times. AOL and Microsoft fall between these two.

• In terms of total minutes spent reading email on each of the web-mail services, users spent 25 billion minutes in August on Yahoo mail. They spent 10 billion minutes on AOL mail, 9 billion on Microsoft’s mail, and 2 billion on Gmail.

comScore’s numbers also show that AOL is performing worse than Yahoo and MSN in what is a stagnant portal arena, Hansell said.

AOL’s audience of 110.6 million users is down 3% from last year, while its rivals grew slightly. The average number of minutes spent per user on the AOL portal declined 22%, while time on MSN fell 11%. Yahoo’s average time rose, though only a small amount.

Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads

Yahoo formally launches its ad network

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 12:44 pm

Yahoo on Wednesday formally christened its new ad network, dubbed APT.

The ad exchange, which was formally known as AMP!, is aiming to streamline the display ad buying process by boiling planning and optimizing down to a dashboard. The platform is being rolled out in phases with the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News as the first customers.

APT is an important initiative for Yahoo as it tries to close its monetization gap with Google. With APT, Yahoo is trying to bring more efficiency to display ads and better monetize remnant inventory and better cross sell.

In a statement, Yahoo said APT has “the potential to allow unprecedented ease of cross-selling across the largest open network of publishers, advertisers, ad networks and agencies from a single integrated interface.”

Also see: Odds for Yahoo-AOL deal may increase

That’s a fancy way of saying Yahoo is rolling up ad buys into a dashboard that looks like this:

Yahoo already has a captive audience via its partnerships with hundreds of newspapers, but the big question is whether the exchange holds up over time. Google with its DoubleClick acquisition is looking to bring similar efficiencies to the display ad market.

Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: September 24, 2008

Yahoo announced on Wednesday the details about its system to buy and sell display advertising online, with the hope that the company can dominate the display ad market in the same way Google steers the search market.

Enlarge This Image

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

William Dean Singleton of MediaNews, left, Sue Decker, president of Yahoo, and Jerry Yang, chief of Yahoo, on Wednesday.

Related

Times Topics: Yahoo! Inc.

The new platform, called APT, will allow both publishers and advertisers to manage display advertising across the Web sites of several hundred newspapers across the country, along with Yahoo sites and large sites like eBayand WebMD.

At an event at Advertising Week in New York, executives said that the 800 or so members of Yahoo’s newspaper consortium would be using the system, formerly known as AMP, by the end of the year.

For advertisers, the new system would simplify the buying of display ads. Currently, advertisers typically buy display advertising from individual sites, or use ad networks, where they do not always control where their ads appear. If the platform develops as Yahoo promised, it would allow newspapers to make more money from online advertising. National advertisers do not want to make hundreds of tiny purchases, and the APT platform would make member newspapers’ Web site space available to national advertisers through one national purchase.

It would also let publishers use Yahoo’s targeting capabilities for ads on their sites, and use the demographic and behavioral information Yahoo has about users to show them appropriate ads. That “allows us to charge more” for the advertising space, said William Dean Singleton, the chief executive of the MediaNews Group, at the event.

Publishers can also allow Yahoo and other newspapers to sell their ad space as long as it meets a minimum price. For example, if a publisher knows his sales force can get $1 per thousand impressions on a certain ad unit, he might allow partners to sell it if they can get $1.25 or higher.

The San Jose Mercury News and The San Francisco Chronicle have been testing the system, and the next users will be Cox Newspapers, the MediaNews Group and Scripps Newspapers. In 2009, Yahoo will offer APT to advertisers, agencies and advertising networks…

Google: See, Our Ad Deal With Yahoo Is Harmless (GOOG, YHOO)

Vasanth Sridharan | September 25, 2008 2:00 PM

Google, in its quest to convince people that its search ad deal with Yahoo is a good thing for the industry — and not a monopoly over search — has launched a fact site detailing exactly how the deal will work.

The antitrust pitch we’ve heard before, but the interesting thing Google lays out in a 17-page slideshow, embedded below, is exactly how the ads will look. Google also explains how the deal compares to allegedly similar deals in other industries.

The message Google’s hoping to express is still the same: this deal is not anticompetitive. But here, like before, Google isn’t saying that ad prices won’t go up:

Google does not set the prices manually for ads; rather, advertisers themselves determine prices through an ongoing competitive auction. We have found over years of research that an auction is by far the most efficient way to price search advertising and have no intention of changing that…

Yahoo Fat Farm: How Many People Does Yahoo Need To Fire To Get “Fit”?

Henry Blodget | September 25, 2008 2:02 PM

Yahoo’s fat as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. So they’ve hired Bain...

Yahoo’s Right Media ad exchange was so broken some turned it off

After Yahoo confirmed it has been experiencing problems with latency at its Right Media exchange on Monday, I’ve heard from those at ad networks using RXM, verifying latency issues were widespread. How bad was it? One Right Media client actually turned off Right Media exchange for a period until latency issues improved. It’s not clear if the problems have been fixed for everyone yet, though, or what the problems were. As of this writing, Yahoo hasn’t responded to my request for comment…