Yahoo executives on Thursday outlined plans to improve its mail, news and other main services in the next few months, pledging faster load times, better integration with Facebook and Twitter, and deeper personalisation.
Chief product officer Blake Irving, who has been on the job since April, didn’t signal any bold new direction during the presentation at the company’s Sunnyvale headquarters. Instead, he argued that the company has been on the right track all along and just needs to move faster.
To that end, he promised that the coming changes would be just the first round and that future improvements would roll out more quickly.
Demonstrations at the event included a Yahoo Mail that executives said is twice as fast as the current version and allows for instant messaging from the main screen, along with the ability to post status updates simultaneously to Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo Pulse, the smaller network of Yahoo profile pages.
The plan is to take the Yahoo pages that people spend the most time on and try to keep them there for longer, leveraging the company’s strengths instead of picking new battles–or worse, re-fighting old ones.
Yahoo Search, which like Mail has been losing share to Microsoft and Google, will be revamped with tabs offering categories of results. Searching for a performer, for example, delivers tabs devoted to events, videos, and official Twitter feeds and Twitter mentions.
As with previous Yahoo improvements, none of the tweaks seem like game-changers. Which makes it easier to take Mr Irving at his word when he said that from now on, iterations of the company’s core offerings won’t be held back as Yahoo works on feature sets that “boil the ocean”.
