David Beach's Blog

The Yahoo! Home Page is Slowly Killing Me

<disclaimer> I don't make decisions nor do I have any specific knowledge about the Yahoo! Homepage. Also these are my views and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer...</disclaimer>

I've been reluctant to say anything, but yesterday was the last straw. The Yahoo! Homepage has progressively been getting worse over the past 6 to 8 months. Editorially speaking, it's in the toilet. Functionally, it's, well not very. The Hollywoodization of Yahoo! has taken its toll on my sensibilities as a product manager and information architect. Yesterday, some nitwit decided to put up an image of a sculpture of Britney Spears "giving birth."  That image was featured for more than 24 hours in the ridiculous Entertainment module on the home page. You can see it above, there. But I'm sure it hasn't escaped your attention.

My problem is that sensationalism has taken precedent over findability. The Yahoo! homepage bombards you with tacky content, animated ads, advertising take-overs, and so much noise that it's difficult for you to do what you intended to do when you launched your browser.

Sure the cheesy "entertainment" stuff has a high click through rate. But that shouldn't determine its value. I could put a link that says "Live Nude Girls!" on a page, and I'm pretty sure you're going to click on it. But this causes a problem. It's a distraction and it takes away from your original intent... searching, checking mail, shopping, finding, etc. It also takes clicks away from more deserving areas of Yahoo!

Yahoo! should be about helping you find what you're looking for on the web. That's how we started and that's the focus of the Search & Marketplace organization. We've gone astray by giving credence to tabloid tactics and noisy advertising rather than helping people.

I won't use My Yahoo either. So don't bring that up.  Unfortunately "My" does not offer the flexibility that I need to access important Yahoo! features and outside content. Right now, it's a dinosaur.

The soon-to-be-released redesign isn't helping the matter. If anything, it's making it worse. From what I've seen so far --and these are public screen shots on Flickr-- search is shoved up in the header, and the primary focus of the page is the entertainment news. If they go with this kind of layout, that crap will be front and center and bigger than ever. Plus, none of what I've seen is very original. It looks like a clone of the new AOL or MSN front pages. We can do better.

Ultimately it's about brand. How do we want to be perceived in the marketplace for 2006 and beyond? As an also-ran cheese ball portal or as a valuable tool for people to get the most out of the web? Millions of people from around the globe use Yahoo! as their start page, we should honor these folks by focusing on our core values.

If you want tabloid entertainment, there are plenty of choices available. I just don't know why our homepage needs to be one of them.

I'll write more later and make suggestions as to what I think we should do, but I needed to get this off my chest.

Netvibes is my new home page.

Thank you for your time.

 

Best Mac Mouse

It's the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. Okay that's out of the way.

I've been searching for a better mouse than the extremely disappointing Apple "Mighty Mouse." That thing is a pile. The left/right buttons are unintuitive, the side buttons are uncomfortable and get in the way, the little scroll ball is a pain in the ass. It doesn't scroll up for me, and the side scroll happens on accident, plus it's  too easy to click. All in all, it's a bad design and a very bad mouse.

So last night I searched all around for what people thought the "best mac mouse" was. I could not find any information. MacWorld had terrible content as did Mac Addict. Review sites were not helpful either. I literally spent about an hour trying to find what was considered to be the best mouse for a mac. Totally frustrating!

Finally, I narrowed it down to two wireless laser mice. The Logitech MX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse and the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000.

I decided to go with the Microsoft mouse because Merlin Mann of 43 Folders uses one (he's a great filter for this kind of thing... does a lot of the work for you.) and it was a bit cheaper than the logitech.

So far, It's fantastic. For all of you frustrated Apple Mouse users out there. Give this one a shot. I'm sure you'll be happy about it. And for those Mac journalists/reviewers who still carry a grudge over Microsoft for some lame reason, get over yourself.

Swedelife: Audio Blog: Supertronic - Electricity

I've decided that whenever I post a track from Supertronic (my old experiement), I'll feature it here as well. Something tells me you might enjoy it. Geek to the tenth. Please check it out and let me know what you think. There's more where this came from.

Link: Swedelife: Audio Blog: Supertronic - Electricity.

More on Yahoo! Hack Day 2

It was a huge success. There were so many hacks. Way more than last time. The quality and thinking behind the hacks was also improved. This tells me the initiative is working. People see the value of this and are taking advantage of the opportunity to express themselves in this manner. I believe that it's one of the best things Yahoo! has done. At least internally.

The room was packed. I don't think I can discuss specific hacks, but there were very clever innovations presented. I believe there were many more search hacks this time. Upcoming, Y! Widgets, Flickr, Autos, Shopping, 360, Local, Travel, WebJay, Maps, Messenger, Mail, and more were all represented and hacked in one form or another. I'm sure you'll be seeing many of them appear live on the site in the near future. Actually it would be cool to somehow identify the new feature or service as something that was developed through Hack Day when it goes live. At the very least the orgs respective blog should blab about it.

I don't know when the next one will be, but I'm preparing. I said earlier that I'm going to learn to program and I meant it. I taught myself pretty much everything I know this far, so why should I stop now? I'm starting with Ruby on Rails, because I hear it's elegant and simple, plus I believe I can understand object oriented structured. I'm also going to brush up on web standards, CSS, and XHTML. It's been awhile and much has changed since I every seriously had my hands on the stuff behind the page. First I believe that this is the only way to get some of my ideas out there, and second, I fit in with nutty programmers and designers more than I do with PMs. I've done the design thing, so now I'm going to try the other side. We'll see how that works. L8r

Yahoo! Hack Day 2

Photo_03
Originally uploaded by jchaddickerson.

It's our second Hack Day today. At this moment I am sitting in a big steamy room filled with candy, mexican food, pizza, beer, soda, and glorious geeks. Every single person in this room, save for humble me, is freaking brilliant. I see famous and should be famous faces in the world of web code. I am witnessing the future of the medium, which in turn is your future whether you know it or not. I'll post more later. I just wanted to say; "Yea for Hack Day!"

TalkCrunch & Thoughts for Today

I don't have the energy to come up with a decent title for this post, so search engines be damned...

I've been catching up with some podcasts this week. This morning I finally took a listen to Michael Arrington's (from TechCrunch) TalkCrunch. I heard their first installment about calendaring. Really cool stuff. The podcast does so much to put humanity behind these sweet, new products that are being developed. It's important to keep that in mind. I got such a better sense of what zvents and 30boxes are doing and trying to do. I came away with a deep respect for these guys. Michael and Nic as well. Above all the web is about people. Most Web 2.0 applications are designed to provide people with a voice, or control, or a place to feel involved, or comfortable. Getting to know the people behind these products in a comfortable and casual way is something that Michael is doing with his podcast.

Since calendars are very near and dear to my heart, I was happy to hear some good discussion on the subject. zvents has a great grasp on monetization which I'm so happy to hear, and 30boxes understand its audience and is well positioned to take off in the next 6 months. This also makes me happy :)

I also enjoyed the discussion on how all of these guys realize that they can't get caught up in the hype. They recognize the importance of the core early adopters and influencers, but they understand that there is a huge audience of folks that need simple applications and are very new to the social web. Again, happy to hear that, with these guys. We can not design for ourselves. We have to solve real problems. So check out TalkCrunch if any of this junk interests you. Michael is a tremendous filter; pay attention.

I've been encouraged lately to start to learn to program. Leonard and Andy from Upcoming.org suggested that I jump into Ruby on Rails. I've considered this before, but I'm now convinced that it's something I need to do to better express myself. A working demo or prototype is the only way to get people's attention these days. No one reads documentation or can understand wireframes or even rendered designs unless they have something to play with. I'll keep you posted on this new chapter.

Tom Cruise @ Yahoo! This Morning...

No comment.

Bruce Sterling Speech @ ETech 2006 v2.0

Here lies some video I shot from the ETech conference of Bruce Sterling giving his great speech about The Internet of Things. In this section he is discussing the nature of Web 2.0 and quoting Alan Liu who wrote the book "The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information." Bruce is a great speaker. I love his style and his use of language. He's a master. It's about 10 minutes and totally engaging... (I'll comment later on my VideoEgg experience...) Enjoy!

Update: Sean Coon has a terrific post about Bruce Sterling's speech at SXSW (I had to miss it as I was on a flight home...) He also links to audio and video: Check it.

SXSW - Music Sucks

I'm not saying that the music at SXSW sucks, though that might be the case. Last night I went to one of the greatest record (CD) stores in the country. Waterloo Records. Waterloo is a renowned destination for discriminating music lovers. It's been awhile since I've been in a decent record store as they're very rare nowadays. The only one even close that's near me, is Amoeba in SF. I never get up there. So if you know me, going to a great shop is something that I look forward to.

Man I was disappointed. There is nothing good out there. It's not Waterloo's fault, it's the industry. I was looking to spend a decent amount of money on some cool and rare finds, but I had to struggle to spend $35.

I see this as a huge problem. Mediocrity is ruling the music industry and it's not getting any better. Look at the review magazines and sites. More and more you see one, two and, three star (out of 5) reviews. Everything is boring. Even bands that should put out great music are succumbing to the doldrums that permeates the era.

Much of this, or all of this is due to the ineffectiveness of record labels. Since the 90's and perhaps the 80's, labels care more about when and how soon an album from a band comes out than what is actually on the album. So quality of music has been affected and the standard bar continues to be lowered. As each year passes, it gets worse because new bands are influenced by existing or established bands. So music is being watered down across the board. Even indies.

It's pathetic, especially in these troubled times. We should be hearing challenging music, there should be a new punk or rebellion movement. Where's the anger, where's the passion? It's like everything is on Ritalin. If history is any indication, we should be hearing the most fucked up, insane, awesome sounds ever recorded. Instead the corporate structure of the industry has quashed creativity and innovation in order to make their quarterly numbers. Because sameness is safe and predictable.

The Internet has not helped. The "leveling of the playing field" that the web has supposedly brought about, only made it worse. There may be some good stuff out there, but good luck trying to find it for all the shit that is being uploaded.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The worse music gets, the worse music gets. And corporate labels want to know why sales are down? Funny. It's not because of downloading. It's because of the homogenization of the product they are releasing. No wonder why people download for free; music today isn't worth anything.

My Lunch With Canter

Just got back from a great lunch with Marc Canter and his family. He brought his wife, Lisa and his cute daughters, Mimi and Lucy along. His niece, Molly was with us as well to help wrangle the kids. Very cool!

It was a long lunch so we had plenty of time to chat about our backgrounds and ideas. I really enjoyed it. It seems that our paths should have crossed many times. And perhaps they have. He came down to IUMA several times in the beginning and was also on the board of Think New Ideas who tried to buy my company once. We used to say that "it's a small valley" I guess that really does apply. It was nice to hang out and chat. I'll be going to his panel later this afternoon on developing for convergent personal devices.

Anyway Marc and his family are awesome people, and I'm really excited about Broadband Mechanics. I hope to hang out with them again soon. Coolio! :)

A Little Post On Tagging

I got my badge and went to work on some stuff this afternoon. I have my bearings now. Austin is a great place. My favorite thing about it so far is the soundtrack. Everywhere I go, good music is playing. A sandwich shop, coffee place, in the cab. They understand music here.

I was at a pre-SXSW party tonight. The usual suspects were there. Andy, Leonard, and Gordon; Scott Beale, Jesse James Garrett, and other now familiar faces. I met Thomas Vander Wal there as well. I have seen his name around and it was good to finally put a person to the user ID. We spoke for a long time about all sorts of things, as he's very big into folksonomy (ok he created the word) and social networks.

I was going to email Thomas about this, but I thought I'd write about it here instead to lure him in... we spoke a bit about Yahoo! Shopping and the tagging of products. We have thought about this at Yahoo! and have discussed it at length. It's my feeling that our users are not ready for the concept of tagging a product object yet. And since products are already classified it would take time for people to think beyond that to submit meaningful tags. We have enough noise on our site already. Thomas understood, but he sees value in the idea. He gave Amazon and their tagging efforts as an example. He said he tagged Adam Greenfield's new book Everyware with the term "ubicomp" because ubicomp is short for "ubiquitous computing" and that's the subject of the book. Okay that's good. That makes sense. But here's my problem, and it took me from the time I left the party until now to think of this... Up until now, tagging has been used to label and define personal objects. My photos, my links, my blog, etc. I do it for me and me alone, not really for the benefit of anyone else. The fact that it does benefit others is a nice after-effect, but it's not the reason I tag. Nor is it the reason most tag. If people tag at all, it's to put the object that they are tagging into their own personal classification or context.

This is why we see "personal" tags on Amazon products. These product objects do not belong to the individual, so to put the object into a personal context, the individual tags it with a personal term. Usually it's a person's name or a note to themselves like a simple classification. They use it as a shopping or wish list. Here are some examples.  1. 2. 3. You can see that the iPod is tagged with words such as "ipod" "iPod" "me wantie" and "katy".

This may not always be the case, and I expect that advanced computer books on Amazon fair better than most other products, but it's certainly a trend worth commenting on and the main reason why Yahoo! Shopping has not implement product tags. Just some food for thought... Am I off on this Thomas?

Here's an idea that is sort of related... tagging yourself. Funny. Again... it's about defining your own object.

ETech Thursday & SXSW Friday

I'm here in Austin. But first let me talk a bit about the final day at ETech. It really was a mixed bag. On the positive, it had some of the best presentations of the event, including one by Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz. I had many people come up to me and tell me how impressed they were with him and Yahoo as a platform. I also had some more good conversations with the Plum folks. Hans Peter, Julie, and Margaret.

On the negative side, things got messed up. First ETech had to move locations within the hotel because of another event coming in over the weekend. We were crammed into these very small meeting rooms instead of the nice big ballrooms as before. But worse than that was the wi-fi connection. I've hesitated commenting on it all week, but it was pretty bad. Actually it was non existent on Thursday. Of all places to have a sucky Internet connection.... All week presenters were making excuses, they couldn't show proper live demos, it was embarrassing. People paid a ton of money to be there and possibly a ton more to present... the fact that the wi-fi wasn't available is inexcusable. Hopefully they'll fix it for next year.

All in all it was a good show, great people were there and I came away from it inspired.

Now I'm in Austin. John C. Riley (boogie nights and chicago) was on my flight. I got to my hotel late. The hotel has spotty internet as well. Right now I'm in a cafe trying to catch up on two days of email. I don't have a car and I'm not certain if I'm going to regret that. The Convention Center is a couple of miles away and it's already pretty hot (at least it is for a Santa Cruz type). I understand that the have free public transportation, but I'm not sure if I'm going to have time to grok the schedule.

Tomorrow is a packed day. A full day of meetings. I'm going to as many social network and folksonomy presentations as possible. There's nothing here about e-commerce which should tell you about the state of things. (nothing at ETech either).

Comparison shopping is a commodity. It's our job to build a killer distributable platform and then layer on top the right differentiating technology. That's where my head is at...

more later.