Yahoo! 360: A great start

By Charlene Li

I’ve been playing with Y! 360 for a few hours and have to report that it’s a great start for the service. The profile is your standard social networking-like profile – you fill out basics like the movies and books that you like. You can see my 360 page here.

The blogging tool is also very basic. You can upload one photo (no files) and there’s a WYSIWYG editor. There are a few glitches and while it lacks many of the bells and whistles I’m used to on my Typepad blog, it gets the job done.

What was interesting is that I started seeing bits and pieces beginning to integrate from the Yahoo! network. I could easily upload photos from Yahoo! Photos, my groups were integrated in, and even reviews I did showed up.

What was really fun (OK, not so fun) was sending out invites to all of the people who had requested them (sorry, I’m out of them so far – turns out you only get 100). I noted something interesting there – a preponderance of gmail.com addresses. So I counted and this is what I got: 22% of requesters had Gmail accounts, 18% had a Yahoo! email address, and 3% had hotmail.com domains. Interestingly, there was one person with a Yahoo! email and MSN Spaces personal Web site – I have a feeling he/she will be changing that URL soon!

So kudos to Yahoo! for pulling it off. In my past conversations with various blogging and social networking players, many said that they were safe from portal entry because "large companies can't innovate". Well, MSN Spaces and Yahoo! 360 are proving them wrong -- while it's just a start, these services have the loyal base of users to build a large group of users very quickly...even if they aren't as sophisticated and innovative in their offerings right now.

By all means, keep adding your comments and thoughts about the Yahoo service, especially as it compares to other blogging and social networking competitors.

First look at Yahoo! 360

By Charlene Li

I got a detailed walkthrough of Yahoo! 360 this afternoon, and I have to say, the Yahoo! team has done an excellent job thinking through key details of how to not only integrate blogs and social networking, but also how to pull in elements from the Yahoo! network. I’ve included a two screenshots that they shared with me for public distribution. (And if you’re a Forrester client, click here to see how I envisioned Yahoo! would incorporate social networking and blogs into their service a year ago – it’s pretty close to what their vision is).

Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people. To this end, your home page on the service shows the most recent content published by people within your network. This might be a blog post, a photo album, review, or an updated profile item. This page is constantly refreshed as the people in your network update the information on their spaces. This fundamental concept of linking people through their updated “stuff” is what makes Yahoo! 360 unique – and inherently will drive usage of the service higher than traditional social networks. In essence, the content is being pushed to you by the service.

The profile page contains the usual features from social networking sites friends, profile, lists of things you like to do, where you work/went to school, and groups that you belong to on Yahoo! Groups. But it also excerpts content you’ve created that you want to share with your network. This includes not only a blog, but also photos from Yahoo! photos, reviews created on Yahoo! Local, and LAUNCHcast Stations. Its similar to what MSN Spaces has, where users can add content from MSN Photos and MSN Music (Click here to see more on MSN Spaces.)

Also similar to MSN Spaces, as well as Lycos’ Circle product is the ability to set privacy controls for different pieces of content. I can decide to share a specific album with, say, my work friends and another album with only family. At the time of the beta launch, the privacy controls for the blog will be for the entire blog, but Yahoo! said that a top priority is to add privacy controls at the post level.

The blogging tool itself is pretty basic. It allows the insertion of photos, comments, and trackbacks. You can control who can post comments, again through your pre-set groups. Only photos are supported, but Yahoo plans to offer the attachment of other file types soon after beta launch.

One very nice feature was the invitation process itself. Y! 360 integrates with address books on Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Address Book – you can go in and select the people you want to send an invite to. They will add the ability to invite contacts from within Microsoft Outlook soon after launch (are you beginning to see a trend here?). The email invite itself was very nice – it sends a very brief profile of you the photos from your profile and a link to a preview your page. This gives the user an idea of who is inviting them and what the service can provide.

The ability to leverage your network to get something done is what gives Y! 360 the real potential to become something even bigger. At the beta launch, users will have the ability to look narrow local business reviews by their network – a rec’d from someone I know counts for a lot more. Of course, this assumes that people will start creating reviews (a clever way for Y! Local to jumpstart reviews on the service). In the future, I can imagine new modules for job searching, dating, travel planning (“What hotel in Paris would you recommend?”), car buying…the list is extensive. Yahoo!’s (as well as MSN’s and AOL’s) advantage is being a one stop shop in terms of leveraging your network’s knowledge across multiple categories.

The service will be made available to a “select group of beta testers” on the morning of March 29th. Those beta testers will be allowed to invite as many people as they would like – no limits are being set. One thing about the beta – it appears that Yahoo! has a detailed roadmap of improvements that they plan to make to the service, with several becoming available after the beta launch date. Gasp! A real beta! So I’m expecting a lot of glitches, changes, and general growing pains…but I’m setting aside a couple of hours already on Tuesday to get my 360 service up and going.

Yahoo! Mail ups storage – get ready for Gmail coming out of beta

By Charlene Li

Y! Mail announced that they would increase storage to 1 GB, up from 250 MB. That now matches Google’s Gmail offering, byte for byte (MSN’s Hotmail is still offering 250MB of storage, but you can expect the inevitable announcement in a few weeks).

In addition, Y! Mail is also adding free anti-virus cleaning to its existing free anti-virus detection service from Norton.

Why are they doing this? It appears Google is readying Gmail for primetime, having recently increased the number of invitation to the beta test to 50 per existing user. Y! Mail is one of the three major “doorways” for user to enter Yahoo!, the others being the home page and MyYahoo!. It makes sense for the company to defend the it’s position, especially when it comes to preserving user loyalty.

What it means: Get ready for a full out battle on the free Web-based email front, as Gmail, Y!Mail, and Hotmail battle it out. Look for more feature creep in the areas of POP access, mail forwarding, and especially given the Gmail user interface, more dynamic scripting.

Diller Asks For Search

By Charlene Li

The oft-maligned Ask Jeeves team (“Are they still around?” is what I often hear) should now be having the last laugh. InterActive Corp is rumored to be buying them (from WSJ and NYT) something around $1.9-2 billion.

First, congrats to Ask CEO Steve Berkowitz on his team. Having worked with them for years, I’ve seen innovation after innovation, but lacking the network and traffic, they usually got short-shifted. They have good personalized search, desktop search, their own algorithmic search engine, and of course, their recent purchase of Bloglines. Add in their ownership of properties like Excite, iWon, and My Way, and they make a great acquisition target for IAC.

Here are a couple of ways IAC will leverage the Ask Jeeves acquisition:

-      Search drives much of the traffic for key IAC properties like Expedia, Citysearch, and Match.com. Having direct connections to a search engine, even a smaller one, will give those companies insights into how consumers use search and how to best leverage other search engines. It could give IAC companies a much bigger leg up, especially in the area of organic search optimization.

-      Distribution via RSS of eCommerce promotions. Think about it – all of IAC’s properties are highly dependent on return traffic, not just acquisitions via search. Bloglines represents an untapped opportunity for IAC properties (and other marketers) to reach their customers through personalized feeds (I want all the upcoming concerts for the Indigo Girls in the Bay Area, and if they’re in Boston during an upcoming business trip that I booked on Expedia, also let me know). And even more importantly, because the feeds are delivered online, they can develop rich profiles of those users and target ads, services, and products to them (with strong regard to privacy, of course).

-      Ask Jeeves already has a partnership with Citysearch for local search. Look for Citysearch to beef up its offerings with more Web-crawled information a la Google, supplementing its already deep entertainment listings. Face it, you don’t go to Citysearch to look for your plumber, so both Ask Jeeves and Citysearch

Two big challenges face the combined companies:

1) Gaining user loyalty. As I’ve written in the past (blog, and on Forrester.com), search loyalty is still up for grabs. Jeeves has only a 3% market share (based on which search engine North American online consumers use most often to search the Interent). If any of the above strategies are going to succeed, IAC will have to invest heavily to promote a repositioned Ask Jeeves strongly against formidable competition.

2) Diversifying revenues beyond their current Google revenue share (which represents about 70% of total revenues for ASK). IAC has got to be watching MSN’s new paid search product launch closely and thinking about whether to renew with Google when that contract is up for renewal in 2007 – or to strike out on their own.

Upcoming Forrester search marketing bootcamp

By Charlene Li

I'll be hosting a Forrester boot camp, "The Essentials Of Search Marketing" in our Cambridge, MA offices on Wednesday, April 13th. We had our first one in December, which received high marks from the attendees. For a detailed description, agenda and guest speakers, go to this link. And if you have any questions, just email me.

Update: I've gotten some questions about how "essential" this boot camp is, and whether it would be too basic for most search marketers. At the last boot camp, we had several advanced search marketers from major e-tailers that spend millions on search each year. At the end of the day, they came up to me and said that the material was excellent and drove their thinking forward -- one even said that it was by far the best seminar she had attended in years.

You can imagine my relief and excitement! It's a continual challenge to create an agenda that can bring "newbies" up to speed but also provide new material and insights to people who consider themselves "search pros". One of the best things - just being able to talk among ourselves about our questions, concerns, and ideas about search marketing.

One of the best parts was the panel at the end of the day that helps pull everything together. So far, we have confirmed participation from Avenue A/Razorfish and iProspect and I'm waiting for confirmation from two search engines.

MSN announces new paid search service pilot

By Charlene Li

MSN will announce its highly anticipated new paid search service, called adCenter, at its MSN Summit Wednesday in Redmond. The service will be piloted for six months only in Singapore and France. Here’s the press release.

A key component of the service is the ability to look at audience profiles for specific keywords. *Update: I took down the screenshots as they had some confidential information in them. I'm working to get some new ones from MSN as I think they give a good idea of how the new ad platform will work.* In the first screenshot, you can see gender, age group, and lifestyle segment for a specific keyword. This allows an advertiser to target their ad more finely to that audience. It does NOT mean that advertisers will be able to target their ads only to men between the ages of 26-40 – that type of functionality is still far, far in the distance.

Reporting is also pretty robust. In the second screenshot, you can see the audience profile for people who clicked on all of the keywords in a specific campaign.

A couple of things to note (a fuller analysis of this announcement will be available on the Forrester site in the morning – I’ll provide an update to the URL when it becomes available).

-         MSN will continue to use the Yahoo Overture Search Advertising platform (it was easier when it was just “Overture” for the foreseeable future. Clearly, MSN’s intent is to keep all of the search advertising for itself, but for the time being, they are playing the role of a good partner.

-         This sets the stage for what I call “targeted search”. There’s no reason why search should be any different from other types of advertising, where you can target creative based on your audience knowledge.

-         Marketers will spend more on search because of this, primarily because they’ll be able to better optimize their ads against key audience segments. We recently surveyed several search marketers and they said that the ability to target search ads would have a large impact on their search spending.

So the big question becomes, what will Yahoo! and Google do? Clearly, Yahoo! has the audience data to move in the same direction and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did so at pretty much the same time MSN moves into major markets like the US and UK. Meanwhile, Google doesn’t come close to having the user data that portals like MSN, Yahoo! and AOL do. I don’t expect Google to suddenly start asking for user registrations – instead they will quietly start adding cookies to users’ browsers to provide clickstream data for behavioral targeting.

All in all, the entry of MSN provides much needed competition – it seemed like Google and Yahoo were constantly innovating on the user search experience while search advertising was standing still (OK, I’ll allow that geographic and contextual ads have been innovative, but nothing as potentially game-changing as targeted search).

And it appears that marketers agree. I’ve been speaking with several marketers and agencies over the past few months that have had the opportunity to preview the new service and there is wide-eyed excitement at the prospect of having rich audience intelligence at their disposal. I think the reality is that it will take a while for the promise to be met, especially since true targeted search – where you can selective buy access to specific audiences -- is still a while off.

WSJ has a write-up here. And Danny Sullivan has a detailed write-up on the features here.

Yahoo! announces blogging and social networking betas

By Charlene Li

Until today, Yahoo! was the only major portal site (I include Google in this group) to not have a blogging or social networking offering for its users. Well, welcome Yahoo! to the fray! I spoke very briefly with Julie Herendeen, VP of Network Products at Yahoo! (disclosure: Julie and I are old friends from HBS) tonight about the service. Yahoo! 360 will have three major components:

1)      Blogs for Yahoo! users. You’ll be able to control access to the blog by designing how can see which sections. Presumably, this

2)      The ability to add content from within the Yahoo! network to the personal space. This will primarily include Yahoo! Photos, but also any reviews you’ve written for local businesses, music/movie reviews, and Yahoo! Groups. This will eventually evolve to also include non-Yahoo! network content, presumably through RSS feeds (an extension of Yahoo!’s RSS service available today on MyYahoo!)

3)      Be able to see reviews from people within your “social network”. This would include music, movie, and even local business reviews, with the idea that you trust the reviews more from people that you know. It’s a little unclear at this point (I was being briefed right before getting on a flight) whether this feature will be available with the launch or in a later edition.

On paper, it’s everything I would hope for from a portal like Yahoo – fully integrated into the service. It closely resembles MSN’s integration of Spaces into MSN Messenger (see my review of MSN Spaces here).

I’ve long contended that portals will be the 800 pound gorilla in the social networking space, simply because they are more likely to have social groups already as members (see my Forrester report on social networking here). The largest social networking groups can’t hold a candle to Yahoo!’s 165 million registered users.

Here’s my personal example – my entire family (brothers, parents, in-laws, husband) are all Yahoo! loyalists. While I really like MSN Spaces, it simply makes no sense to try to convince my extended personal network to port their relationships over there, even if I’m an MSN fan. So if I’m going to share photos or family news, it makes sense to do so within a service that everyone already uses.

Yahoo! 360 will be available only in beta only by invitation. Once you have an invite, you’ll be able to invite others into the network (this was the strategy employed successfully by Orkut and Gmail). The beta will start on March 29^th.

So here’s your chance – send me an email if you’re interested in joining my network and I’ll invite you as soon as I get my account. Your payment – tell me what you think of the service.

Update 3/17/05: I've received over 50 requests, so I'm going to have to put a stop to the requests for now. As soon as I work those already in the queue (note: I haven't gotten the beta myself yet!!) I'll post it. Also, if you requested a beta from Yahoo! and actually got it, please let me know and I'll take you off my list.

Bloghercon conference proposed

By Charlene Li

Quick – name me five woman bloggers. You probably came up with Wonkette, and if you’re reading this post, you’ve got me on your list. Can you come up with three more?

This is why Lisa Stone’s suggestion to develop Bloghercon is such a great idea. (Elisa Camahort has a follow-up post with more details here.)

It’s not that there are no women bloggers out there – it’s that we haven’t built up a network comparable to the “blog-boy’s club” that dominates the Technorati 100. This is not to presume that there’s a conspiracy – just the reality that for a number of reasons, woman bloggers have had difficulty gaining visibility.

My hope is that the conference (in-person and in an ongoing, virtual meeting place) would 1) provide support and training for woman bloggers; 2) showcase all the great things woman bloggers are doing; and 3) connect women with each other.

Hey, isn’t that what all good meetings do? So how would Bloghercon be different? Here’s one example: One question raised so far is if there would be child care available. I think this highlights one major difference between male and female bloggers – it’s not that we want to bring our kids to Bloghercon, but a reality that women are called upon more often to juggle multiple facets of our lives (men do this a lot too, but admit it, the burden still falls mostly on women). It’s that unique point of view, that vantage point that women provide, that I hope Bloghercon will develop.

So let’s do it! I can’t wait to get together to grow our ranks and the volume of our voices.

Google Desktop Search goes “live” and will press into corporate desktops

By Charlene Li

In what seems like record time, Google moved its new Google Desktop Search (GDS) out of beta today, after an introduction last October (see my initial comments here). The latest release has a couple of noteworthy new features:

-         New file types. PDFs are now searchable, as are MP3s and video files.

-         GDS is now accessible via the Google Deskbar, and can even be “undocked” and placed anywhere on the desktop.

-         Password protected Office files won’t be indexed

-         A software developer’s kit (SDK) is being made available to create new plug-ins to GDS

There are two significant implications from this announcement. First, the SDK will allow software developers to create extensions for GDS. Taking a page from Firefox, GDS won’t try to be everything to everyone – it simply can’t do it. Instead, it will allow developers to create plug-ins based on specifics needs. Want to search MSN Messenger chat sessions? Write a plug-in for it. Submit it to Google and if it “passes” their review, they’ll post it on the official GDS site for others to use. What it means: You know those 225+ searchable file types touted by Yahoo! and its partner, X1? GDS with the SDK will blow it away, limited only by the creativity of the developer community.

Second, moving quickly out of beta allows Google to move quickly into the corporate desktop space. In much the same way that companies installed Google Toolbar at the behest of employees clamoring for pop-up ad blockers, employees are asking for desktop search tools as well. But most company IT departments have a standing rule not to install beta software. Now that GDS is “official”, IT will seriously look at making GDS a standard installation.

While GDS lacks an enterprise tool set for now, I expect that Google will release one soon. In the meantime, IT departments should take a very close look at the presets for GDS, especially its ability to index Web histories, chat conversations, and older versions of documents. Some companies may not want that information archived and thus, “discoverable”. IT departments may feel pressured to make GDS generally available, but until they can easily install it with appropriate setting, clear guidelines and instructions on GDS settings should be issued.