Toluu : Yodel Anecdotal

Yodel Anecdotal

Back in April, we rolled out our vision for a more open Yahoo! — with “open” defined as rewiring Yahoo! so we could 1) open our network to outside innovation, 2) unlock the power of your social relationships, and 3) mesh your Yahoo! experience with other sites to bring you the best of the Web.

Today that vision takes another important step forward. We’re officially cutting the ribbon for talented developers everywhere, who are now welcome to come in and access our tools and data so they can build applications for a more customized, social, and relevant Yahoo! network and beyond.

I won’t bore you with the plumbing — you can head over to our developer network for those details — but let me summarize the potential impact on you the user as developers dig in and begin to build their applications.

Most obvious will be the social aspects. At a high level, we’re rolling out a social platform that will draw on the hundreds of millions of connections on Yahoo! – everything from random encounters with someone who commented on the same photo as you, to d

Your social control panelOctober 16

One of the key dynamics that is re-shaping the Web these days is “social” – social networks, social graph, social bookmarking, social news, social gaming. A rapidly growing segment of Web users is making connections, discovering new things based on feeds, and staying on top of relationships using a variety of social destinations and services.

That’s why we’ve been hard at work integrating a new social foundation into Yahoo!. Today, as part of this, we’re upgrading profiles.yahoo.com with a new universal profile. Available in beta to all of our users around the world, Yahoo! Profiles is a centralized control panel that lets you manage your identity, activities, interests, and connections across Yahoo! — and eventually the entire Web. The new profile is a key element of our Yahoo! Open Strategy, rewiring Yahoo! to make it more open and social.

I want to make it clear that this new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo!. Rather, our plan is to integrate “social” as a central dimension into the services you use every day. For example, if you’re on Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, you’re alrea

Introducing Yahoo! Web AnalyticsOctober 8

Have you ever bailed on an online checkout because something in the user experience bugged you? Or were pleasantly surprised that the sponsored listings were more relevant than the regular results of your web search? This week, we are rolling out a new service that creates a helpful feedback loop for e-merchants, website owners, advertisers, and developers based on how well they did with you in critical moments like these.

Born out of our acquisition of IndexTools in May, Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They’ll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction.

We’re rolling the service out in phases for the remainder of 2008 and into next year. The first big deployment is Yahoo! Small Business, whose 13,000 hosted e-commerce customers can get set up just in time for the holiday shopping season at the click of a button. We have already started to roll Yahoo! Web Analytics out to advert

Time for a calendar revivalOctober 8

Online calendars have been around for more than a decade, and they’re tightly integrated with the leading Web mail services used by more than 680 million people per month (as of August, comScore). So it’s surprising to see how few people are actually using their Web calendars. Even the world’s most popular online calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, sees only a mere 8 million users per month.

So why, you may ask, is Yahoo! launching a new Yahoo! Calendar after ten years and why will it be better than your paper calendar or (gasp!) your desktop calendar? Because we think the time is right for these Web-based scheduling applications to finally take off. Here’s why:

Open standards like iCalendar and CalDAV make all online calendars work together so people can share their schedules without the hiccups of the past.
Broadband and mobile device ubiquity means you’re always connected, even if you don’t like to admit it. You need your busy life to be in order and for your calendar to be accessible wherever you go.
Web 2.0 technologies have made it possible to incorporate very cool visual effects and practical f

Myth-busting and the Yahoo!-Google agreementSeptember 26

There’s been a lot of speculation swirling around about the Yahoo!-Google agreement. We hear everything from the claim that Yahoo! and Google will be fixing prices to the prediction that the agreement is a death sentence for Yahoo!’s sponsored search business. Since the critics clearly don’t understand the deal and what it means for Yahoo!, Google, advertisers, and users, it’s time for some myth-busting.

Here’s the bottom line:

Yahoo! will use this agreement to help us become a stronger competitor in all aspects of online advertising; and
Yahoo! is not exiting the sponsored search business. We plan to remain a strong player in sponsored search.

What is the agreement?

You may have heard that the agreement gives Google control over 90% of search advertising. That’s just plain wrong. It’s simply a contract that gives Yahoo! the right, but no obligation, to show Google AdSense ads on Yahoo!’s own network. It’s important to note that the agreement is non-exclusive and gives us the option to “backfill” with Google ads if and when we see fit. The reason we structured the deal this way – rather than a more typical exclusive deal with revenue commitments to us and traffic commitments to Google – was precisely to avoid the issues the critics are raising.

Since Yahoo! bought Overture three years ago, we’ve run that business as a closed system. For example, if you want to put a sponsored search ad