Yahoo! to! buy! social! networking! Yahoo! is likely to buy its way into social networking, and it accepts that Google has won the search game. Ari Balogh, Yahoo's chief technology officer, told Reuters Global Technology Summit: "I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in-house." He said now was a good time to buy because …
Ari Balogh says “Search the way we know it, with 10 blue links, Google has clearly won that game. Saying anything other than that is just not stating the fact." - well done. A for effort. Someone else won the game you were playing in, you acknowledged it, you moved on, kudos to you. You're welcome to marry my sister any time.
Oh, hold on a minute ...
"Yahoo! is also aiming to make many of its other services more Facebooky. The company believes it effectively already has a social networking infrastructure underlying its services and just needs to add the bells and whistles. It is adding more social features, like status updates, to its mail service shortly." - Erm, guys, Facebook are playing that game and they have it won hands down. Myspace and Bebo are playing catch-up, and what you're aiming to do is add a status upgrade to whatever shitty interface you already have and enter the pack at the back? Good luck with that.
Coming soon:
"Yahoo! to! take! on! Wal-mart! and! Tesco! at! supermarkets!"
"Yahoo! to! take! on! Flickr! for! photosharing!"
"Yahoo! to! take! on! Home Office! for! stupidity!"
etc.
Mine's the one where I left my common sense in my other jacket.
My website has had 14,000 hits so far this year, we are badly ranked on Google but ranked very high on Yahoo for certain key phrases. 62% of traffic comes from Google searches, 2.5% comes from Yahoo!
Assuming most websites are experiencing similar trends, says it all really, No! one! uses! Yahoo! Any! More!
"He said looking at a page of search results was an anachronism, put too much onus on the user and was accompanied by extremely ugly advertising."
Too much onus on the user. to click the result they want?
Are you kidding me?
Next they'll be shoving the result I want into my own face without asking, and calling it "intuitive human neurone search picking technology", but it won't be. It'll be one of their sponsored links.
Ugly advertising?
Better take a look at yer own search results pages mate. Last time I looked (2002 or there abouts) it was crammed with nasty animated/Flash banner ads.
Actually just checked now and it appears to look identical to Google results, although with a bit more cruft round the top and bottom.
The problem Yahoo has, is that it has all these different services but no integration.
Flickr is excellent, but it was already excellent before Yahoo bought it years ago.
Yahoo Groups was big for a year or so but now's just full of spam... they could have pre-killed facebook/myspace with that and must have decided not to.
Yahoo Mail/Calendar is borrowing big-style from the (most excellent, actually) Zimbra project.
There's only 1 solution... Geocities 2.0 and Yahoo Auctions mash-ups! Oh no...
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