New My Yahoo Signals It Has Abandoned the Geeks

Does anyone among the tech influential spend any significant time on Yahoo anymore? I sure don't and for years I did. I have a couple of their news feeds, but for the most part it seems like all the action is on Google and a bunch of startups. The only sites where Yahoo has inroads with geeks are del.icio.us and Flickr and neither of them is monetized. It's obvious they're too nervous about alienating the community, so they play it conservative here.

I remember an era gone by when Yahoo was just like Google. They took chances. They recognized that the "techfluencers" were critical for driving mass adoption. Now it seems like they're a big conservative company that's going straight for Maw and Paw America. That's cool and it plays to their strengths but why own del.icio.us and Flickr? They should flip them to Google. Cut your losses Yahoo and invest in your mainstream winners - like Yahoo Answers. Oh and Yahoo 360 is totally a site that deserves better. It's a ghost town. Sell it to Six Apart. They'll nourish it.

The new My Yahoo is another example of how the portal has turned its back on the geeks. Yahoo had an opportunity here to take widgets - which are popular with the tech elite - and push them mainstream. They have always had a knack for making the geeky easier but the new site is just basically a fresh coat of paint. What a lost opportunity to build on all of the great work Arlo Rose did with Konfabulator and port it to the web. I wonder how he feels living in such a conservative company.

I remember just three years ago how Yahoo had serious Web 2.0 mojo. It took RSS and pushed it far and wide. Now it has turned it's back on RSS like it's a plague. The same goes for blog search too. Yahoo is clearly trying to be the un-Google. They have ceded the war for the geeks to Google. That doesn't bode well for sites like MyBlogLog. And further, it hurts their chance in winning in the Web 2.0 world. We are the ones who set trends. Look no further than Second Life and Twitter.

By the way, this is a smart strategy for Yahoo. It follows their strengths. However it does mean that there's a bunch of Yahoo properties that are not like the others. They stick out like sore thumbs and I bet they will one day be sold.

Comments

[Chris Clarke]

RIP Yahoo!
A year ago I thought they could do no wrong. In a year, they've done very little right.

[Narendra]

Steve,

Yahoo bought flickr and del.icio.us to better understand tagging and how it can be used to produce better search results as well as more relevant ads.

The PR windfall they got was purely a bonus.

The MyYahoo upgrade is simply a long overdue cosmetic revamp, don't read anything more into it than that. As far as widgets go, they seem to be pretty mainstream on MySpace ;-)

[Tom Kirkham]

Steve, right on man! It is a shame, too. Besides the geeks, Yahoo has the reach - what with all their links to the death star - AT&T DSL customer - to push RSS and other technology to the masses, and they just sit on their hands. Lets face it, Joe mainstream doesn't even know what an RSS feed is, much less the power of flickr, youtube, and other 2.0 technologies, even if they do use it.

Google is creeping into everyones lives little by little everyday.

[Randy Charles Morin]

I don't think Yahoo! has abandoned RSS. They've simply put it where it belongs, in the background.

[Paul Short]

I'm not quite sure where Y! is going lately. It's as if they're trying to walk too many tightropes when they should be adding them all to the width of the highway.

The days are gone when bolt-on projects are for the greater good of the company. They have to add more value to the core or they're just that - bolt-on projects.

[Benjamin Garrett]

Steve,

Hi, I ran the engineering side of MyY for about 3 years, back when we did the RSS module that you mention... and the big RSS release that Jeremy wrote about.

The big thing that changed is that MyY is associated with the Yahoo! front page in the org. MyY has become essentially a personalized Yahoo! front page with this beta. It's even got the Personal Assistant and ad below from the front page.

It would be cool if they had another personalized page that was more geared towards influencers.

-ben
http://feedable.com

[Ericson]

What does "Look no further than Second Life and Twitter." mean? Is that just more mindless gobbdlegook about "web 2.0"? Neither Second Life nor Twitter is particularly popular, or cutting edge.

[Jason Berberich]

Steve:

I'm surprised you've already forgetting Yahoo Pipes, which just last month was heralded by Tim O'Reilly as a milestone in the history of the internet.

I think you are right about the side of Yahoo that most people see (search, mail, My Yahoo), but I think they are still doing some interesting things in their labs like Pipes. I just hope that continues.

[Jeremy Zawodny]

What do you think will be sold?

[Joel Anderer]

Looks like the ex-head of My Yahoo agrees with you Steve,and has some other things to say:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pageflakes_response_myyahoo_beta.php

[Joe Duck]

What *in the world* are you talking about Steve?

Yahoo's continues to recognize the significance of community, Social Networks, and Web 2.0 to a greater extent than Google and has been contributing a lot of great stuff to the new mix.

Social Networking and geek support appear to be a cornerstone of Yahoo's future plans.

A *few* among dozens of examples:

Pipes - A powerful RSS Development tool

Flickr - better than Picasa and more community driven. Very developer friendly for mashups, blogs, etc.

Answers - FAR better than Google Answers (now abandoned) and recently communitized into what could become a very powerful social network.

Hack Day - developer support.

There are many more examples, but to write Yahoo off at the beginning of the revolution in online social network development seems very odd to me.

[Comer, hablar, amar]

One thing where Yahoo excells, by far, Google is in groups.

[Steve Rubel]

Jeremy, for starters I think Yahoo will sell de.ici.ous to digg or Google because it can't monetize it.

[Scott]

It kills me. I loved my.yahoo for so long. What lost me was what they did to bookmarks. A big yawn and now Google reader is officially by homepage. End of an era.

[Rob]

I can remember using Yahoo all the time before Google. Now? I logged in a few years ago and my email account had been closed! Goodbye Yahoo. I'm subscribed to their baseball feed (only partial text) but other than that and fantasy baseball, Yahoo is useless.

[Jeremy Toeman]

"And further, it hurts their chance in winning in the Web 2.0 world. We are the ones who set trends. Look no further than Second Life and Twitter."

First of all, what exactly is "winning" the Web 2.0 world? 200K people? Does it really matter?

Second of all, neither SL or Twitter is a success yet, at all. They are having a good run, but it takes a lot more than that to be successful.

Next, exactly what trends are y'all setting? Look at the BIG successes, not the cool little widgety stuff, and tell me which ones were made successful by a few "in the know" bloggers? Not youtube, not myspace, not facebook, ...

Finally, Yahoo shouldn't sell off ANYTHING, they are doing things just fine. If Google were making the exact same moves (which they do, all the time), everyone would say they are a bunch of geniuses.