Product Pulse - July 12th, 2008

Posted July 12th, 2008 at 11:31 am by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 5 Comments / Filed in: Product Pulse

Forty-six years ago today, a guy taking classes at the London School of Economics grabbed some friends and performed at a small jazz club in London. They didn’t get paid a dime. Two years later, they outranked the Beatles in popularity. After you hum a few bars of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” see what wild horses dragged out of us this week:

• Be the BOSS: We’re sitting on a goldmine of search infrastructure and thought it was about time we shared. Enter Yahoo! Search BOSS (short for Build Your Own Search Service), a new open Web services platform that brings DIY to one of the most valuable assets on the Web. If you’re a developer or owner of a site of any size, we’re giving you the keys to creating unlimited search mashups for the search experience of your dreams. If you’re a user, be prepared for searching to take on a whole new dimension when you’re visiting your favorite sites. We’re leveling the playing field and want everyone to play ball. More here, here, and here.
• Beta be gone: It’s official. The old My Yahoo! is being sent to Sunny Acres Farm on Monday, to be replaced with the *new* My Yahoo!. You’ll find a pile of new content like third-party (gasp!) modules from Netflix, Facebook, and Gmail, as well as custom-designed modules with more of the best stuff from select publishers (Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, People, Salon, Wall Street Journal, etc.). You also get more flexibility and control over page layout and easier customization tools. What’s more, the team has launched the My Yahoo Content Gallery, which presents cool cherry-picked modules that you can add with one click. And they’ve improved the search capabilities to surface content that’s related to your query. More here. Mine, mine. All mine!
• Pinpointing your peeps: Ever wondered where all those people you’ve met in your favorite Yahoo! Group are from? Now you can get a visual representation through People Map Beta, a new “grouplet” launched by our new “Groups Lab” team. Group owners and/or moderators fire off a form to their members, who voluntarily complete it with information that puts them on a map and becomes a dynamic mini-profile. More here. Stay tuned for more cool hacks from the Lab.
• I’m busy but this is really funny: If you’re an avid user of Yahoo! Messenger status messages, you know what a bummer it is when you have to tell people you’re busy, on the phone, away from your desk, etc. That’s because it means your friend won’t be able to click on your latest favorite video link. Or see that you’re peeved by coffee grounds. Or see what song you’re listening to. In the latest Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta, you’ll notice your days of sacrifice are now over. You can have your cake and eat it, too. More here on how to mix work with pleasure.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

Tagged: groups, messenger, my yahoo!, open source, Product Pulse, search

Post a Comment Bookmark This Digg This

5 Comments Add your own

gag | July 12th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

another something about search that could be thought about is yahoo directory categories + relevant flickr images = search results

so the search page is a scrolling layer of horizontal images and vertical image topics

ex:
layer zero is a mashup app of below selections before getting the search result if its a complicated query
ex: robot+japan+emotion = web result

layer one is about Location (globe/geography) with maximize and minimize or zoom

layer two is about things (consumer/manufacturing) with zoom
move the slider left-right and select a image which is associated with a category

layer three is about living beings (animals/humans) with zoom

their can be many vertical layers

maybe the above whole thing is very silly but its just to further brainstorm beyond language and keywords

Tori | July 13th, 2008 at 1:06 pm

Why are you taking away My Yahoo? It’s been my homepage for 7 years. I’ve tried the new site & I just don’t like it. Please don’t make me switch.

Nick | July 15th, 2008 at 12:45 pm

It’s been 24 hours now. I’ve been looking for news everywhere that you’ve come to your senses and will allow us to revert to our old “my yahoo” pages.

Are you not listening? Are you trying to trash your client base before Steve Ballamer and Carl Ichan take you over?

What are you thinking? Thousands and thousands of us want our old homepages back. You made us waste millions of manhours yesterday trying to find our old bookmarks and make the crap new page “fit” information we had stored for years. You’re making grandmothers have to think about things like “optimizing the page for 1024 x 768 and higher screen resolutions.”

Who needs it? I havn’t seen an ad on My Yahoo since I switched to Firefox with Adblocker 3 or 4 years ago. My old page was clean, orderly and had everything I needed right there.

Yesterday when I turned on my machine, somebody had trashed my desktop, spewed things everywhere, stolen bookmarks, hid my bank account from me, in short, my office was demolished.

This is a little like the “New Coke” debacle of a few years ago. Either let us have the choice of going back to My Yahoo “classic”, or watch as thousands, if not millions of us switch to Pepsi (Google, in your case).

Your blunder will go down in business history books under the heading “Companies who screwed their client base for no particular reason–and paid the price”.

How come nobody has answered any of my emails? You are proving to be the worst company I’ve ever dealt with. I’ve been here 10 years, and now, in 24 hours, you’ve killed all the good will you’ve built with me in that time.

Could I have some human response, some press release admitting that you were wrong, your sorry for trashing millions of desktops yesterday, and that you’re going to make it right–letting us have our old pages back?

We have lives–we can’t learn new software whenever you (or your new Microsoft masters) decide we need to. Microsoft is why I bought a Mac. I just need my computer to be familiar and work. I don’t need the latest whiz bang processor and bandwidth hungry thing.

Give us our old page back.

And apologize.

Regards,

Nick

Michael S. | July 15th, 2008 at 5:35 pm

Nick in the previous post is right-on!

Pay attention to him.

Do your work because you enjoy it, not for Carl Ichan or Steve Ballamer.

Nicki Dugan | July 17th, 2008 at 4:52 pm

@Nick and @Michael S. — thanks for your feedback. We hear you. And we do apologize for the bookmark situation, which we are actively working on. You might head over to the My Yahoo! Blog for some more commentary from the team. But it’s worth noting that we involved users (lots of them… over many months…) in making the changes to the product, through a wide variety of things like focus groups, online feedback and more. It’s with their feedback in mind that we evolved the new My Yahoo!. It appears to be a hit with most people. I know that doesn’t address your individual concerns and frustrations about a new experience, but when you’re making products for 42 million people, you’re bound to have different opinions. We hope you’ll stick around and give it another try, because we have more in store.