I’ve Said Too Much

I said I’d explain why there’ve been so many references to Yahoo! recently. Here’s why: I’m going to be working there, for a second time. Here’s what the press release says:

Yahoo! Europe today announces the appointment of Simon Gunning and Lloyd Shepherd to the Yahoo! media team. Their mission is to develop ever more relevant and engaging content for users across Europe building on Yahoo!’s market leading position in areas such as news and games1.

Simon Gunning joins as Director of Entertainment and Games and Lloyd Shepherd as Director of News, Sport and Information. In their respective content sectors, Simon and Lloyd will be responsible for defining and executing pan-European product strategy as well as market and partnership development. They will also be working alongside other product leaders in the Yahoo! group to define and benefit from global opportunities.

To say that I’m excited would be an understatement. From March 13th I’m back in the Y! fold after a five-year absence, responsible for the News, Finance and Sport platforms across Europe, working with the fantastic and dedicated local teams in each territory to deliver the best, most complete offerings in all those verticals. It’s going to be an absolute blast.

I seem to be writing a lot about Yahoo! at the moment (of which more at another time), but last night I finally got up and running with Yahoo! Go thanks to a new N70 phone and some luck fiddling with settings.

After some early problems with connections to Vodafone UK, suddenly it started working, and by God it’s an amazing tool. Essentially it installs a suite of applications onto your phone which mean the phone is in real-time sync mode with Yahoo! Calendar, Address Book, Mail, Tasks and Photos. Previously, I’ve been mimicking this kind of mobile server-side life by synching iCal and Address Book between computers on OSX using .mac, and then synching to my phone. Yahoo! Go obviates the need for that, and I’m assuming (though don’t yet know) that if I was working in a Windows/Outlook environment I’d be able to sync that too.

I can’t emphasise how big a step this feels. With all the fuss about Web 2.0 calendaring and social sharing of events going on elsewhere, we’ve been in danger of losing track of the core piece of calendaring and contacts functionality - that adding a contact or a date or a task from a device makes that new data available to me on any other device in as near real time as we can get it. Oddly, it was Scott Gatz at Yahoo!, not one of the mobile mavens like Beattie or Lindholm, who really waved the flag for this:

The real exciting news is the Yahoo! Go app itself. This is one of those products that only comes along once in a while and words cannot do it justice. It’s one of those products that you see and say “oh, that’s how it always should have been” or “wow, now it gets interesting”. So why am I so excited? It seamlessly syncs your mobile phone with the web. Your device is just a live input to the web.

* Take a picture with your camera - it shows up on Y! Photos. That’s it. No sending to an email address, no waiting to upload. Just point, shoot, and its shared (I can’t wait til they add Flickr support)
* Meet someone, type their phone number into your phone, it shows up in your Y! Address book. No syncing, no cables, no button to press.
* Works in both directions - this is the killer one for me. I manage a lot of my addresses/phone numbers on the web and I always forget to sync. Also the idea of me being able to get all my favorite family photos on my phone without having to upload them to my phone rocks. It’s a slideshow in my pocket without having to every plug my phone in.
* IM & Mail too - you can do Voice IM on your phone. Your email box is totally in sync (kinda like IMAP for your phone)

I realize in writing this how excited I am about it, but how hard it is to explain why. If you have a Nokia Series 60 phone, drop everything and go get it. If you don’t, find someone who has one and get them to try it out and show you.

I agree with everything he says. But (and there’s always a but) I did have some issues with it:

• Installing and getting going is too much hard work. Mostly this is because Yahoo! is working around the messed-up mobile infrastructure, where phones are locked down and typically don’t naturally connect to PCs, but really, this is going to be a big brake on take-up
• Battery drain: after one day of use, I’m already finding my battery levels collapsing very quickly. To be expected, of course, the phone is doing a lot more work - but again, may worry people.
• Data charges - a classic problem. I just don’t know how much I’m spending. I’m going to wait a month before signing up to a data plan, so I can see how much data I’m using, but some kind of obvious data usage counter would have been useful.
• The Mail paradigm is interesting. What Yahoo! Go does is drop your Yahoo! Mail into your messaging environment on Symbian 60. This means that, suddenly, you get a lot more messages. I realised pretty quickly that I was uncomfortable with this: SMS just feels like a more personal, messaging type environment, where people can get me quickly, and email just felt too heavy-handed in there. So I turned Mail off. Which leads to….
• Switching services off and on is clunky. It should be really easy. For instance, when going on holiday. It’s possible but not obvious.

The biggest problem, probably, is that Yahoo! Go is a Symbian 60 only platform, which blows out a great many handhelds. This is reflective of the massive problems Y! faces in getting this out to the mainstream: the fact that the mobile sector is fragment and locked down by aggressive operators. Even something as innovative and amazing as Yahoo! Go is going to struggle against that.

But this is an enormous step forward. I really hope they make it fly. I’m already hooked

In an interesting post about What’s been going on with Yahoo! Answers? on the Y! search blog, I read this:

Before long, people started using Answers to ask questions about Answers. So we started a Yahoo! Products section, where users respond to fellow users’ questions about Answers. This worked so well, we’ve expanded the product section to include Yahoo! Mail, 360, and Messenger.

Interesting that this should have started happening almost organically, and it seems a great way of providing onsite help with the help of your user community. I wonder if they’ve thought of packaging something like this up and going after the likes of RightNow with it?

It seems to me that the argument that Google “breaks copyright” with various services is beginning to gain some serious traction. Take this column by the perspicacious Charles Arthur:

Jens Redmer, director of Google’s Book Search program in Europe, looks hurt at suggestions that the scheme is anything but altruistic and legal. It must help authors, he says, for books to be found. (Perhaps that’s true, but personally, I’d rather argue the publishers’ case before a judge.) Google gets the book contents free, gets to sell adverts against them, and the publishers get … what? The promise that they might sell some more books. It certainly sounds like something for nothing. And once again, it’s Google that gets the something, and everyone else who is left scrabbling for the scraps.

The interesting phrase in that is that Book and Library Search “must help authors”. Interesting because, broadly, it’s not authors who are screaming about Book Search - it’s publishers. The reasons for that are pretty obvious - it’s publishers who provide the “monetisation mechanism” for authors, and as Google moves more and more into their patch they can hear the screeching sound of disintermediation growing loud in their ears.

[Sidenote: a while ago I chatted with a friend who works for a big, big company in New York. He needed some information from an expensive business book, including data and some analysis that wasn't available anywhere else. How did he get it? Google Book Search, used selectively and intelligently. I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but do we really believe that publishers aren't losing out when that happens? Does the benefit of "being found" outweigh the death by a thousand cuts such as those? And who's weighing the difference?]

Then, there comes the PaidContent story that Google’s image search has been accused of copyright violation by a US district judge:

The judge noted that Google’s mobile picture search had a role in this ruling: Google Mobile’s image search option permits handheld devices to perform the identical search of more than 2 billion images, then save the scaled-down images for future reference. Those scaled-down images are similar to what Perfect 10 offers as a subscription service through U.K.-based Fonestarz and could, the court ruled, harm the market for Perfect 10’s subscription-based image sales.

From the blog of Khoi Vinh, some job specs for NY Times designers, including this one:

This person will help develop new areas of NYTimes.com with a special focus on producing customized weblogs. He/she will also be providing design and coding help as necessary for prototypes and to improve the NYTimes.com user experience. A thorough knowledge of weblog publishing software, especially WordPress, is required.

Very interesting, of course. I wonder what “customized weblogs” might look like? Also, it sounds to me as though NY Times is gearing up for some fundamental design changes and, most interestingly, starting to think of itself as a place where good design and usability is central. Will watch with interest.

When I first read about the Reuters wiki of financial terms I thought, wow, interesting, innovative, hot. Must check it out.

In other words, my response to it was entirely conditioned by my own individual proclivities. Basically, these can be summed up by the phrase “if it’s cool, it must be good.” I am your archetypal early adopter, quick to enthuse before rapidly becoming bored.

So, is the Reuters financial wiki aimed at me? Probably. I’m blogging about it right now, which means the Reuters brand has edged up imperceptibly in the Pageranked blogosphere. But out in the real world, doesn’t Reuters hope that non-early adopters - you know, people with real lives and normal attention spans - will take up some of these things? Of course they do.

Which is where my beef starts with this wiki idea. Mainstream users don’t want to know how Joe Bloggs defines “money market.” They want to know how Reuters defines “money market.” If Reuters is anything, it is an impartial describer of the world; if it isn’t that, it isn’t anything. So why on earth would it put its badge on the definitions of any Tom, Dick or Harry who cares to make them?

Ross Mayfield thinks he knows why:

So what is the potential reward? Reuters is putting itself at the center of it’s industry in cultivating shared language. The renewable resource becomes a focus of attention that can be directed in respect of the social contract. The community that may form, their greatest challenge going forward, could contribute tangible word of mouth benefits. This is community marketing, people — an essential move as trust and influence shifts from institutions to peers. And very significant institutions are starting to get it.

But Reuters’ industry isn’t “cultivating shared language”, it’s in describing the world in as much detail and with as much authority as it can muster.

Reuters describes the wiki project thusly:

The Reuters Financial Glossary is a freely-available, online, open resource for information about the financial markets. It is a collaborative project based upon a written glossary previously written and edited by Reuters Editorial; this web site is an experiment in collaborative editing around previously existing content.

Fair enough. But where on earth is this leading? I would argue that the Reuters “opportunity” is precisely the opposite of “collaborative editing” - its opportunity is the same as it’s always been, to be a definitive, locked-down, reliable and authoritative reporter of events. And what’s more, to try this experiment in the world of financial markets seems doubly perplexing, given the tight nature of regulation in those markets, where authority is something that can be measured and acted against. What happens when the first person makes an investment decision based on something they read on the Reuters wiki, and then raises it with the Financial Services Authority?

None of which is meant as a criticism of Reuters. This is clearly an interesting experiment, and I’ll be watching it in that light. This is more part of a general theme I’ve been mulling over - the extent to which the really trusted media brands (of which there are very few, I’ll admit) water down their own authority through community participation. Whether that will happen here we’ll have to wait and see.

Neil makes a good point about community, in response to research showing that half the UK adult population participate in some kind of online community:

The numbers are also a reminder that, while participation in some kinds of online community may remain something of a minority sport (for instance chat participation or blog commenting) the number of people taking part at a lower level of intensity - posting biogs on FriendsReunited, or travel tips on BeenThere - is much higher. And there’s an even bigger number just watching, for now.

Community is no longer for geeks and early adopters, and has probably been mass market for quite a long time.

I’m heading to the Alps for some snow for half-term. Apologies if this blog drowns in a sea of spam in the interim, but I seem to have been targeted!

I’ve been reading quite a lot of stuff over the past few days about how folks are disappointed that RSS isn’t making the jump into the mainstream. Scott Karp had some good thoughts on this, so did Fred Wilson, Dave Winer responded with some even more interesting remarks, and Matt McAllister’s got some stuff to say today too.

While broadly agreeing with the premise that RSS is currently “too difficult” for a mainstream audience, I’d also urge people not to rush it. Because the fact is that RSS is gluing all sorts of things together at the front end and the back end.

Take, for instance, the story that Feedburner have just announced a full API into their system. This, for me, is where a huge amount of potential lies with RSS - in its ability to allow different systems to talk to each other, to embed themselves into each other (in this, it’s quite a lot like XML-RPC and the various blogging flavours of it which have driven an awful lot of integration over the past few years). For me, it’s entirely understandable that the RSS front end is still a bit squishy and unfriendly - people are still trying to get to grips with the possibilities of it at the back-end. Not because people are stupid, but because those possibilities are just so huge.

What does “beta” mean today? Two interesting thoughts on that out on the Interweb today. First is Jeneane Sessum’s post on The Business of “Betatizing” The Web

The role of the beta release today is to invite customers inside the organization — not just to find bugs and get that nebulous “buy-in,” but also to feed their interest and nurture their passions, because a beta user today won’t spend time on an application unless it’s something that moves them.

The unspoken intent of software/service providers in releasing beta products today is to actually listen to and incorporate the best of the feedback from people who pre-love the product, to develop a lexicon with a user base that will power conversation throughout the evolution of the product.

In addition, because beta users are connected to — and talking to — one another via the net, their shared passion and resulting buzz have the potential to transform xyz beta into the next big brand.

On the other hand, here’s Nik responding to my grumble about 30 boxes:

Well, they do say ship early and ship often, but it’s important to remember why they say that. It’s not for the sake of it. It’s not to garner publicity (premature publicity being what Joel calls the Marimba phenomenon). It’s to get some real people using it early so you can shake out the wrinkles. And when you’ve shaken out the wrinkles you expand your user group and find more wrinkles and shake them out. And so on. And before you know it you’ve got a world-beating product which everyone loves.

This is one of the themes developed by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado.

So it’s crucial to get that initial user group right, and it’s crucial to listen to them and act on what they demand. If in your user group you include people (like Joel and Lloyd) who don’t think you’re going to listen to them then you’ve lost those customers perhaps for ever.

Who’s right? Controlled user group, or open beta? Well, both. The thing that worries me, though, is that these days people are very, very quick to draw conclusions on something online. I’ve done it myself - 30 Boxes doesn’t work for me because of two pieces of functionality, but overall it seems like a nice product. So how does 30 Boxes get me back once I’ve made that snap judgement? Might it have been better to have a controlled, genuinely two-way dialogue with a smaller user group before opening it up to a time-poor, quick-to-judge world? Hmm.

Here’s a mad, zany idea. According to NetImperative, VisitBritain, the British tourist board’s temple for visitors, is going to be redesigned:

VisitBritain, the website for the Birtish tourist industry, has selected digital design agency Start to revamp its website, following a four-way pitch.

Start said it will incorporate new and emerging technology into the site, which will relaunch in Autumn 2006.

Wouldn’t you think tourist board websites would be absolute no-brainers for community-driven content? If you want to know where to go in Britain, what would you rather do: check out a chunky big piece of brochureware, or ask some people from Britain? I’ll bet that Guardian Unlimited’s Been There sites on Britain are already ten times as useful as even a redesigned VisitBritain site will be, and we’re still in beta. Unless they put personal recommendations in, of course.

Reading Jeff’s post on CoComment got me really excited about the possibilities. CoComment is in closed beta at present, but the idea is a big one: aggregate all your comments on other people’s blogs into one place which you can then use within your own blog. Jeff takes this idea and runs with it with this wishlist:

I wish I could collect the crumbs I leave across the web: a review on Amazon, a photo on Flickr, a tag on Del.icio.us, a group-podcast soundbite at Schlaflos in Muenchen, a quote in a news story, a hotel rating at Trip Advisor, a forum posting most anywhere, a comment on a blog, an edit on a wiki, and interactivity yet to be invented. I wish I could bake that all together - every bit of it with permalinks and authorship - into a feed on my blog that can be organized in clever ways by topic and content type. I wish I could follow all those bits of conversation. And if I really want to get a headache, I want there to be more layers of conversation on top of all that. Oh, and it needs to be searchable. We’ll figure out the ad opportunities later.

That is my aggregated identity. That is my tsotchketrail. And this, I think, is a first step toward that.

Nice. And as a publisher, I’d like to add to that list of ideas: what about letting people provide their “tstochketrails” alongside Guardian content? Use tags to pull it together, and get the juice on what people are saying wherever they’re saying it. Very nice.

Or again - what about giving selected advertisers access to my trail in return for unspecified goodies?

It’s been interesting to watch the efforts of Rocketboom as it tries to sell a new form of advertising - which it co-creates with the advertiser and which it has complete control over - in a new way. Basically, they’re selling slots to run after their broadcast every day for a week. They’ll conceive and produce the ads with input from the advertisers.

In other words, they’re letting advertisers into their world, on their terms. They’re betting that the strong association they already have with their audience, combined with the disaggregated distribution network podcasting gives them, and finally their personal “approval” of an advertiser, is worth a lot of money.

They could be right, but as many people have pointed out - most articulately Jeff Jarvis - the network to sell an ad in this way just doesn’t exist yet. Advertising might well oil the wheels of creativity, but for the emerging disaggregated social media, advertising is locked in a strong-box called “the normal way of doing things”, and it doesn’t want to come out yet, thank you very much.

So Rocketboom have been forced to sell their commercial inventory on eBay. An interesting idea, but also an indication of the paucity of other options. It’s currently selling for £15 grand to someone you’ve never heard of. MediaPost has an interesting round-up of the process so far:

BlogAds founder Henry Copeland, whose firm bid on the ad space but dropped out when the bidding topped $12,000, said the inventory’s value might be worth as much as $50,000. “Being the first advertiser on a cult show like this, with the ads actually being produced with Amanda, assuming that is the case, is worth a lot more than $15,000,” he said, referring to Rocketboom star Amanda Congdon. “An anal-retentive media buyer will get focused on the difficulty of verifying the viewership numbers, how many of the downloads are actually watched–and miss the novelty value and cult status of the show.”

Copeland said it was not surprising that the bidding had not yet reached the higher valuations, and that the top bidders are not big-name brands. “A decision to spend takes way too long to make it through the bowels of the decision-making process,” he said. “And a lot of buyers are going to have trouble with Rocketboom having creative control over the ads.”

Baron also said that Rocketboom used eBay because conventional ad sellers moved too slowly. “We tried to go with ad sellers, but it was taking too long and our deadlines were never met,” he said. “We kept hearing that it was taking too much time for the advertisers and everyone else to understand how it could work.”

It is kind of interesting that a major consumer electronics brand (Sony? Motorola?) hasn’t come in and just splashed 100 grand on the table. The chance to be the first advertiser doesn’t come along every week, after all.

Chris Anderson has written another in his excellent series of Long Tail essays, this one on The Death of the Blockbuster, Part IV. Anderson’s thesis (backed up with some fascinating stats) is that Hollywood superhits are making up less and less of the overall revenue from movies in the States:

Bottom line: even in Hollywood, the home of the blockbuster, hits are losing their power. It’s not nearly as dire as in music, but it’s trending in the same direction. Does this mean the end of movies? Not at all–there have never been more films made, just as there has never been more music available than today, despite the fact that the bestsellers sell less.

It’s not that people aren’t watching films and listening to music, it’s that they’re watching different films and different music–we’re just not following the herd to the same hits the way we used to. I’d guess that most of the decline in box office is due to the rise of the DVD, not a loss of interest in movies. Likewise for music, where the ubiquitous white earbuds suggest that music has never been a bigger part of our culture, despite the fact that CD sales are back to mid-90s levels.

I’ve just signed up to the public beta of 30 boxes. It looks great, it’s social media elements are gorgeous, and it’s fast.

And, as it stands, I won’t be using it. For two reasons: I can’t import my existing calendar into it (and the days when I would happily spend hours rekeying data into apps just because, you know, I could are long gone). But more importantly, it uses U.S. date formats and, as far as I can see, there’s no way to change that.

This seems a bit petty, doesn’t it? But the point of this post is to emphasise how petty design details such as this are really, really important to some users.

The U.S. date format of month/day/year is a mystery to most Brits (and, I suspect, to most Anglo-Saxons and western Euros). It’s illogical - day/month/year at least has internal logic - and, as far as I can tell, unique to America. Everytime I come across it, my concentration collapses as I try and parse the format.

So a calendar app based on month/day/year isn’t going to fly. I’m going to find it annoying very quickly. On the upside, when an app gives me the option to choose my date format (as iCal does, and I’m sure other things do too) I almost instantly love it. Why? Two reasons: it’s a smart thing to offer, and it makes me feel that the person or company who built the app is aware of a world outside the States.

Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times has confirmed to PaidContent that they bought BlogRunner last year. I met the guy behind BlogRunner, Philippe Lourier, in New York last spring, and he’s very smart, and BlogRunner is great. Good luck to him:

From the interview: “We [also] acquired BlogRunner last year, which is a news aggregator. We discovered it on the Web because the guy who was running it created the Annotated Times. The site took the blogosphere and organizes it by article content, so if the top story in NYTimes is about social security, then it would take all the conversation around that on the Web and organize that. It creates this nexus of content and community which we think is very powerful. We are taking that and we are adding that back into our website.”

Esther Dyson has compared Yahoo! and Google by saying Yahoo! is intelligent design, while Google is evolution:

“Google is blind evolution. They have this … users-in-charge, bubble-up philosophy. Their employees can come up with ideas. There’s this kind of Darwinian internal selection process. … They have a very clear vision; they’re not quite north to the North Pole. They’re going west, they’re going forward but they’re blind evolution; they don’t really see where they’re going. Neither do we …

Yahoo, on the other hand, is intelligent design. They have the vision of what they’re trying to build … . Two very, very different models. The other thing that’s really different is Google sees communication as a medium for the distribution of information. … whereas Yahoo, they see information as a medium of communication among people. They get people. They get communities and individuals in a way that Google really doesn’t. Google is blindingly clever. … You have very, very different models of the world. I like them both, and think they will both persist.”

Interesting, although I would wager there’s more intelligent design than we think going on inside Google, and more evolution inside Yahoo!

Jason Kottke’s written fascinating analysis of the state of play of a bet made between Martin Nisenholtz (of the NY Times) and Dave Winer in 2002. The bet was that by 2007 Google searches for top news stories would bring up blogs before NY Times articles.

Jason demonstrates that for quite a few stories blogs are already winning. Interestingly, he also widens the definition of blog to “citizen media”, which brings Wikipedia into the fray. And suddenly the NYT does even worse by comparison.

Jason draws some interesting points which are worth reading, but what struck me was how blog posts have more permanence in Google than the NYT has, for the simple reason that NYT content moves into an archive over time and starts to move down the rankings. For a great essay on this, read Simon Waldman on PressThink. Jason’s research shows how meaningful this is, I think - over time, if you don’t have permanence, you start to disappear.

One of Jason’s examples is “london bombings.” When he did it, there were no NYT result in the top 100 results, probably because the news story broke over six months ago. The top “citizen media” result was Wikipedia at number two, and the top overall result was CNN (do they have a strategy on permanence, I wonder?). When I searched it, though, the top results were the BBC and Flickr. But Jason’s point still stands, as does mine, I think.

An extraordinary thing over at Yahoo! in the States: a news sandbox open to the public, and a 360 blog to go along with it which requests comment from users. How fabulous is that?

I’ll be fascinated to see how the trackback experiment pans out. Frankly, the capacity for abuse terrifies me, and I’d love to know what they’ve got in place to prevent spamming and trolling.

But the blog itself is wonderful, if only because it gives you a sense of Yahoo! as something built by human beings:

The first [new function] is one of those Friday afternoon hacks I wrote. It’s a simple box that appears on the left column of every story that shows you the last five stores you’ve read. It’s most useful to quickly go back to check for updates to a story you’ve already read or find that story you meant to share with a friend. Stories that have updated since you’ve read it are in bold.

A nice idea, described honestly and in a way that makes me want to use it. It’s about people, people.