January 8, 2008
Yahoo’s off-key yodelling
It seems like Yahoo chief Jerry Yang fell into the usual trap of keynoters at CES of trying to sound relevant by demonstrating products in January, but then admitting they will be delivered who knows when?
And for a company that seems forever trapped in the process of trying to make something synergistic from its disparate parts and acquisitions (think Flickr, Upcoming and Del.icio.us), that can’t be good.
Mr Yang said it was time to get Yahoo yodelling again, but the only substance in his speech was the announcement of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for mobile devices and a demo of what Yahoo Mail could look like in the future.
Yahoo Go did look a big improvement on the 2.0 version and the carousel of services it offers, always limited by the size of the mobile screen.
It includes a redesign, a new mobile home page and mobile widgets that third parties are expected to provide now Yahoo is opening up its platform. But the service is only in its early beta phase and is limited to just a few devices.
The Yahoo Mail revamp looked impressive with its ability to rank the importance of address-book contacts and reveal their activities in a style similar to Facebook’s newsfeed and Plaxo’s Pulse.
Jerry Yang showed how an email or instant messaging discussion about where to eat for dinner could be dragged onto a Yahoo Maps icon to reveal favoured locations or turned into an Evite invitation.
However, as Mr Yang and fellow co-founder David Filo confessed, this was still very much in the concept phase.
“We are not that far away, some of the building blocks are there today,” said Mr Filo, in a statement that summed up Yahoo’s continuing quest for its holy grail of joined-up social networking and Web 2.0 services.
