16 December 2008

Yahoo! Strategy: Open For innovative business

It's been a shaky few months for Yahoo! The search engine has been tossed around in a media storm, bouncing in and out of headlines, but rarely for anything positive. The announcement of lay-offs, coupled with the disintegration of the Google deal and the step-down of CEO Jerry Yang have all resulted in shades of radiating across industry newspapers, the blogosphere and the shareholder's conferences. Of course, as the media pumped gloom and doom into the Yahoo! story, the share price plummeted and the ripples of doubt soon become tremors of real concern.

Considering all this negative press, it's been hard not to envisage grey clouds above Sunnyvale California. However as the future of Yahoo! is put on trial, the search engine has been gently unveiling the silver lining with the latest stages to its Open Strategy plan.

All of these changes were finally laid out in one press conference in San Fransisco earlier this week, with the promise of more positive developments in the next few days. Focusing on core properties such as Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! media sites, Yahoo! showcased the final pieces of the open strategy it has been gradually unveiling since April of this year.

Of all the developments discussed, the most significant and certainly the most exciting was the unveiling of the new Yahoo! Mail interface. Rather than simply giving the service a re-design, Yahoo! has focused on turning the service into a 'Facebook-esque' social platform for its 275 million monthly users. The popular mail service which now focuses on 'connections', a grouping similar to 'Facebook friends', allows you to distinguish between your most important inbox contacts and display their activities in a user-activity feed.

The connections feed combines third-party applications and other popular Yahoo! services - such as Flickr and Yahoo! music - updating you on your friend's latest news in the form of photos, applications added, and music likes and dislikes.

As well as changing the mail interface, Yahoo! has made changes to MyYahoo, the customisable webpage similar to iGoogle. While both services allow users to embed applications, Yahoo!'s service allows users to continue using the application right across its platform rather than being restricted to one page like iGoogle.

Although Yahoo! has been revealing new developments for several months now, it wasn't until the recent press conference that the company got to really enjoy some of the praise it deserved. Some of Yahoo's recent developments such as Search Monkey and BOSS have seen significant success; BOSS for example services 10 million queries per day and is still a very new service.

As Yahoo! has struggled to weather the media storm, the company has been criticised for a lack of innovation, especially when compared to arch rival Google. After seeing the latest developments, it's clear Yahoo! still has the imagination and innovation necessary to succeed as a major search engine, and hopefully we'll continue to see more exciting products unveiled over the next few months.

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