The Yahoo Vibe
For years I have found Yahoo to be a “shit” company. This is mainly because my mother kept using Yahoo Messenger while this product proved to be very open to hackers. Frequently she asked me if I (as I am a computer science student) could write her a program to restart other people’s pc (in other words hacking) because this often happened to her. Obviously she wanted some revenge.
So I never used Yahoo, not their messenger nor their email. Strangely I do use del.icio.us and Flickr, two sites bought by Yahoo. On Flickr the presence of Yahoo is steadily growing, causing many problems recently when they forced all old-school users like me to switch to a Yahoo account. On del.icio.us though, they are not that present. On the front page they are not even named.
So what is happening here? When Google buys a product they often totally integrate that product in their own services. Is Yahoo aware of their own (bad) vibe with users, and are they becoming more of a consortium of other services besides their own brand? Maybe one day del.icio.us will also be rebranded to a Yahoo product. I must say that I like most of the newly bought Yahoo products, so on that fact they are creating a better vibe in my sense.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
March 22nd, 2007Google is also consolidating logins. On the one hand, one of the obvious benefits of operating / owning a large number of unrelated web apps is that you can start creating links between them somehow. On the other hand, to do this you need to know which account on service X belongs to which account on service Y, and there’s no easier way to do this than to pimp your own ’single local signon’ kind of thing, like e.g. your yahoo ID or your google ID (= your gmail account).
What’s REALLY needed to solve this problem is OpenID; there’s no chance that your open ID is ‘taken’ on another service; you own the URL, or not, there’s no limbo there.
I also wonder what you are referring to regarding google’s integration plan. What product, exactly, have they ‘integrated’? Google’s big products are as far as I know ALL either totally separate (youtube, uh, that’s all I got) or built in house (gcal, gmail, google search, google homepage, google reader, google analytics, google adsense), with the one exception being gdocs, which I think they bought sufficiently early that the whole ‘import users’ issue wasn’t a big deal.
In fact, I recall that google tried to mash google video and youtube together which didn’t go over well with youtube users. They have since dropped it, apparently.
I have no hard proof of this but just like plenty of other theorizers on the web, I believe google bought youtube because they WANTED to get sued; only after the whole legal battle has been won will they worry about actually leveraging youtube for anything else.
I think the real lesson here is that the moment a popular web service gets bought by one of the big 5 (ebay/paypal, microsoft, google, amazon, yahoo), any attempt at integration WILL be met with disdain. Perhaps a reason for the big 5 to jump on the bandwagon soon enough that the majority of the user base joins after the integration. (like google did with writely / gdocs).
Even reddit’s sale to Conde Nast has left some sour tastes in some of the userbase, and not much changed due to the buyout.
Cristiano Betta http://www.ibbydibby.com/
March 22nd, 2007First of all I have to note that I already agreed that Google rebrand everything. With that I ment Writely, Google Earth and Sketchup. Probably these buyouts were early enough.
Maybe we can see a different trend here? Is Yahoo more eager to buy comapies that already have a big user base?