Tag Archives: yahoo

Google Buzz: Cool, but not a game-changer

Posted by joel on February 9, 2010 1 comment

Google BuzzFor several years now I’ve been lamenting the fact that social networks have been divorced from web mail.  Seems like a natural fit, right?  If you’re already logging into a site that knows who your friends are, why not help me keep in touch with those friends beyond the simple “send an email” option?

Some of you may remember that Yahoo has  been taking steps to integrate their web mail with social networking (and other daily tasks) for a while now.  Facebook wants to add mail to their social network.  Google decided to play catch up today and released Google Buzz, as covered really, really, really extensively by TechCrunch and others.

What is Google Buzz?  Imagine your Facebook feed interspersed with your email, and that’s pretty much it.  When one of your contacts updates her Google status, you’ll see it in your Gmail inbox, and you can comment on it, making it show up in her Gmail inbox again.  Adding a little jab at Foursquare, Google will also allow you to geo-tag these status updates, which makes perfect sense if you’re updating from a mobile device.

So it’s fun, it’s cool, but…it’s a couple years too late.  Most of us just finished building out our Facebook friends lists, and we have co-workers, classmates, and our parents on it now, so I don’t really need another way to announce my status updates to my contacts.  Will I use it?  Yeah, occasionally, but I have far more friends on Facebook than I have contacts on Gmail.  Not everyone uses Gmail, y’know?

This is not a new concept or a new feature, it’s just a more convenient tool for current Gmail users to keep their friends and family up-to-date.  Hopefully TechCrunch will stop flogging this as soon as the “buzz” dies down.

Yahoo finally understands the power of Mail, Google doesn’t

Posted by joel on September 11, 2009 3 comments

screenshot6Over the past few months, Yahoo has been quietly adding more and more features to their webmail solution, Yahoo Mail.  For three years (from the sidelines), I’ve been hoping they would do this, and finally it looks like they’re getting the message.  Perhaps it’s Carol Bartz’ leadership, I don’t know, but Yahoo is finally polishing and rebuilding the biggest weapon in their arsenal.

In the past few months, Yahoo Mail has added support for large attachments (via Drop.io), added various Facebook-like “apps” from companies like Evite, Flickr, and Paypal, and they acquired Xoopit to improve their photo sharing and sending abilities.  They even started allowing Facebook style “status casting” which is equivalent to the Facebook news feed, allowing people to keep track of what their friends and family are up to.

These moves show a new, long-overdue dedication to email.  Yahoo has 350 million email users worldwide, and they have finally realized that email is their Trojan horse that will let them cross-promote and upgrade users to all of their other media properties and services.  Everyone needs email, and very little innovation has happened in the email space in the last 15 years.  If Yahoo can innovate and make social networking and messaging readily accessible and imminently usable for their already enormous audience within an email context, they have a chance to create some major buzz and hold off the Facebooks of the world that are out to eat their lunch.  Just imagine if Facebook started offering actual email addresses – Yahoo would face a serious threat.  Yahoo already has massive reach, all they need to hold off Facebook are tools that let that massive audience connect with each other.

The biggest question I have is whether it is too late.  Gmail was integrated with its IM solution from Day 1, but Yahoo Mail still isn’t well tied to Yahoo Messenger.  Why weren’t my Yahoo Messenger contacts automatically added to my Mail address book so I can see my friends updates?  This is a huge oversight and has hamstrung adoption of the Yahoo news feeds and status updates, but I’m hopeful Yahoo will move to correct this.

Also interesting is that Yahoo is innovating on its email solution while Google is reinventing email entirely with Google Wave.  I haven’t had the chance to say this often, but Yahoo’s approach is right, and Google’s is wrong.  Google Wave is too innovative, too paradigm shifting to gain widespread adoption in the next few years, and unfortunately it’s the kind of product that isn’t worth anything until the people you’re communicating with use it too.  Yahoo, on the other hand, is innovating on email incrementally, making their interfaces more streamlined, and making ancillary features like attachments and photo sharing more native and intuitive.  If Yahoo can get the social piece right, too, they may start grabbing headlines with their features again rather than for their deal-making and constant games of executive musical chairs.

Twitter, MS, Yahoo, Hunch, and other boring news

Posted by joel on August 12, 2009 No comments

yawnSorry I haven’t posted in a while, guys – honestly, there just haven’t been a lot of interesting developments in the digital media area lately.  So, I’ll just tackle a few smaller topics today.

Pointless Twittering: According to a study by Pear Analytics, 40% of Tweets are “Pointless Babble” with another 38% being “Conversational” (which I suppose is a step above Pointless Babble.  A small step.)  Only 3.6% of posts were classified as news, confirming my assertion that Twitter is more of a communication tool than a source of information.  If you’re in the market for pointless babble or conversation, now you know where to go.  On a side note, I love the use of the term “pointless babble” in serious research.

Celeb name power: The social media press should stop talking about Hunch.com just because it was started by a Flickr founder.  It’s not interesting and it’s not (as the press keeps calling it) social Q&A; it’s social polling, more akin to  Sodahead or even the old-school Coolquiz than Yahoo! Answers or my baby.  With social Q&A you get to ask a question any way you want and let other people answer your question.  On Hunch, you can’t ask a question at all – you have to search for decision-making wizards that other users have already created.  And even then, it’s only good for making decisions like whether you should mow your lawn or whether you should renew your World of Warcraft subscription.  If you want to know why the sky is blue or what sights to see in Istanbul, you’re out of luck.  Yawn.  The initial burst of traffic they got from the press is fading, although not as precipitously as Wolfram Alpha’s.

Dumb, smart!: Radio Shack is smart to try rebranding as The Shack because they have nothing to lose.  Their old brand stands for irritable, aggressive salespeople, batteries, and out-of-date, no-name electronics devices, so they could stand to shed some of that.  Pizza Hut, on the other hand, is nuts to drop the ‘Pizza’ and call themselves The Hut.  They will forever be associated with Jabba, and there was nothing terribly wrong with their brand as it was.  The Hut says they changed the name to allow them to broaden their menu, but I say if Burger King can sell salads, you guys can sell just about anything short of sushi.  Don’t get me started on Syfy.

Microyawn: I suppose the whole Yahoo-Microsoft deal is big news, but for the average web user, it just won’t mean anything.  Yahoo search results will look different.  Big deal.

Wake me when Google Wave comes out.  It’s way too overblown to gain any mass-market acceptance, but at least it’ll be a fun toy for tech geeks like myself.