The All-Star Game of the Web

Look at the players - Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, News Corp's MySpace, Time Warner's AOL.
It all started Google's unstoppable growth in Web advertizing at the expense of others. Despite of numerous high quality efforts by Microsoft, Yahoo and others, there is no stopping the Google's march. So MS cannot see itself fighting Google on its own on the web, wants to buy Yahoo in the hope that 2 is better than 1. Yahoo then tried to run away from MS to court News Corp to maintain its independence. News Corp didn't see itself able to compete MS offer and tried to join MicroSoft in the deal. MS see no benefit bringing in News Corp when it can have Yahoo all for its own. Yahoo doesn't want to have anything to do with MS, tries to tag in with AOL and its even prepared to work with the player that is responsible for all its problems, i.e. Google to keep itself independent.

It'll be interesting to see how this game ends. To me, it doesn't look like any of the outcomes would even come close to challenging Google's domination on the web advertizing. You can't beat an innovating market leader at its own game. MS should have known it from its Zune experience. Xbox experience has got more to do with Sony's bigger plan to push BluRay.

MS, instead of buying Yahoo to play Google over the web, should take the game to a different battle field - In-Game advertizing for Xbox, Contextual Advertizing for Television with IPTV, In-car advertizing with Sync or other GPS and what not. If it doesn't make its moves on other fronts faster than it is doing now, it'll be too late.

Yahoo, there is no syngergy to go with MS or AOL or even NewsCorp. It'll be another business deal that would result in different degrees of failure. For Yahoo the game should be to be independent and work with everyone. Be the media company it always supposed to be. Delivering the content and services to its user community whether they are on the web or tivo or mobile or gps or facebook or myspace. Be the no.1 destination and monetize the traffic as best as you can.

Google is at the top of this game with majority of the marketers in its fold. Just sit tight and make no mistakes.

If I were Jerry Yang

I'd put all new updates to the services on hold and create both open social and facebook applications for all its services, if it wants to continue to be the number one destination on the web. Social web sites with all these new functionality would probably be the place where a good chunk of web users spend their time, if they get all their tv and movie schedules, finance quotes, news and gossip in their social networking platforms like facebook, bebo, myspace... fewer people would have incentive to go yahoo services for such information. So the best idea would be to go where the users are. If web browser is going to be replaced by social network, you better be there with full force and provide the best widgets/ gadgets/ apps or whatever they are called. Of course you can still be in control of the advertising that goes with in the app. And also probably can use the expertise to server ads for other apps as well... And if the Yahoo! Mash comes up well, Yahoo would have the advantage that no other social network platform, no other app developer and even google would have as Yahoo will have the option of holding the user to its Yahoo! mash.

Yahoo, start working on your apps and let them be the best.

Beginning of the End (Part One)

I think Nov 2007 will be marked as the beginning of the end for Yahoo! There are two big developments from Google, one in the social networking and one in the mobile space. These announcements not only demonstrate the brilliance of Google, but also Yahoo!s failure. Yahoo! was first in the game with its Yahoo! 360 and Yahoo! Go more than two years ago, but their lack of vision and lack of implementation is now costing them dearly

Yahoo had its best bet before facebook to make Yahoo! 360 a truly powerful social network. It was a great idea, as a platform it was better than other social networks at that time. Its the implementation that lacked. It couldn't even put up all the Yahoo! services on 360. I was hoping they would slowly but surely get there. The unrivalled user base and the content they generate on the Yahoo! is un imitable and can not be repeated. Facebook was not an open platform then, once the Facebook platform is opened up, it was a closed chapter for Yahoo! 360.  To match the facebook, Yahoo came up with another social networking platform called Yahoo! mash, which doesn't have any significant benefit compared to facebook. Still they have not learned from its 360 failure, and the mash team apparently couldn't convince other Yahoo teams to come up with their app for Yahoo! mash. Sure, it is still in beta, but there is no place for excuses in Tech world. With Open Social from Google, hmm its all over for Yahoo! social network plans unless it goes onboard the train run by its biggest rival. Clearly Yahoo! recognizes the glorious future of Social networks which is evident from its purchases like Flickr, Del.icio.us, jumpcut, mybloglog and many others long before Google paid any real attention (Orkut was stupid), but it failed to deliver it twice.

Now they have all these disparate and wonderful services which would eventually fade away once people start having their content on all these apps that are going to be out there on the Open Social unless they become a part of it.

 

Sorry Yahoo!, you couldn't think big enough.

Yahoo! should think BIG

Yahoo is the largest visited site with more traffic than any other site and is consistently at the top for several years. Still in terms of revenues its lagging way behind Google. It is also lagging in innovation. Yahoo! is coming up with more and more services to keep its leadership intact, but it was not able to deliver that next 'BIG' thing. It adopted web 2.0 stuff like RSS feeds, tags etc.. faster than other portals and even Google. But it has lost on its best opportunity with Yahoo! 360, which could have been a best combination of social networking and taking advantage of the huge content that's generated by users every day on Yahoo properties. Shame, it failed on that and didn't go that full mile. Now facebook has hit with its platform strategy and made it big. Wait till it hits the wall street. It may not be as big as Google, but I think it may topple Yahoo! s position.

So, what should Yahoo! do now. Adding more yahoo properties may not help much. Yahoo should take a leaf from facebook and amazon which are providing the front end and back end of the new innovation on the web with Facebook platform and Amazon web services by building on their core strengths. So Yahoo! which is now creating or licensing and hosting most of the content with portals like Yahoo! news, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! Sports and like. should build on its strength - Scalability in hosting content.

If you break the content to the elemental types, most of the web sites have text, images, audio, video in various page layouts. There might also be other elemts like maps, lists, comments, ratings etc.. And who is better than Yahoo! to present them to largest user base.

I think Yahoo! should open up its website for content providers. Allow the companies to create their own micro sites. Give them elemental blocks and give them the power to change the look and feel in the way they like. Provide them a hosted web content management system, where they can upload their content and present it in the way they want. Provide them what Amazon and Facebook are providing separately, give them the storage space to store their content and UI blocks to present it in the way they want. Make it really really easy to add content, just like blogger, flickr and youtube. Host it for them, provide them all the web analytics, host the ads and share the ad revenue.

Its taking Yahoo! web hosting to the next level. Make it for the content creator instead of small business. Smaller content creators like news papers, magazines, local radio, local tv channels, smaller television studios, indie film producers, professional photographers, sports teams, celebrities and what not. And you give them access to all your users and all your services where ever it makes sense. With this, they do not need to worry about all the IT infrastructure and web developers and designers and eliminatr a whole lot of overhead and spend their resources on their core competency, ie creating content.

Its a win-win.

Create A Yahoo! Web. (like world wide web)

Yahoo! digital home??

I just found this new cool product from Yahoo!

Fantasy Sports on your TV
http://digitalhome.yahoo.com/sports/

It looks like a piece of Yahoo! Go for TV, which has been sidelined for a while.
One surprising aspect is, it works with the Windows Media Center instead of being a part of its own Yahoo! Go for TV which more or less is a competitor to Windows Media Center. Is it some sort of death knell to Yahoo! Go for TV, just like the Yahoo! Go for PC is left to death?

But more than that it is the URL that invokes my curiosity. digitalhome.yahoo.com redirects to Yahoo! home page. Sounds like Yahoo! is going to come up with a whole suite of applications for TV that works through Windows Media Center which is being shipped as a part of Vista Home Premium.

But I strongly believe any digital home strategy that requires a connection to a PC is bound to fail. Be it Windows Media Center or Apple TV or Yahoo! Go for TV. If you want to hit the mass market you must go with a set top box like TiVo or XBox 360.

Yahoo! Go and Yahoo! 360 are the biggest bets that Yahoo! made and failed miserably.
Hope they turn around and come up with a cool product that works.

Google Socialstream??

"Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master's program at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "

This seems to be a nice platform to integrate a number of Web 2.0 UG content at one place. Lets see how this pans out.

I am still bitter about Yahoo! 360. Yahoo have more user generated content than any other website. They were at the right place in the right time to bring it all together and come up with a true social networking platform. And they gave us 360, which sucked big time. Now facebook is doing what Yahoo! could've done with 360 and they are building content from ground up. But I do not feel it is adequate enough to last till the last mile.

I'm sure this war is going to be interesting.

In UGC domain, Google has youtube and blogger for video content and text content. Yahoo has literally unlimited user generated content from music preferences, movies and local reviews, flickr for images and also a lot of professional content, that it can pull together to give us a wonderful platform. I still have hopes for Yahoo! They still are in the best position to pull it off.

Yahoo badges/ web widgets

I love Yahoo!
I have come across what they call 'badge' for some of their services. You can add them to your blog to publish what you've been upto on their services. This didn't catch up with the masses much, but I think they are pretty sleek and Yahoo should have a location where you can find all Yahoo badges.

I am posting few of them here, may be others can help me find if they are other badges.

Yahoo Finance Badges
http://finance.yahoo.com/badges

Yahoo Site Explorer (not too fancy)
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/badge

Yahoo My Web, for saved pages badge or tag cloud badge.
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/badge

Flickr Badge
http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne

Yahoo Answers badges
http://answers.yahoo.com/my/badge_selector

Yahoo Travel, Trip Planner badge
http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?action=badge

Yahoo News Photos badge
http://news.yahoo.com/badge/wizard/photo

Yahoo Babelfish to translate the webpage in to chosen language
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/free_trans_service

Yahoo Upcoming.org badge
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/badge/