Yahoo! Answers life’s questions

By Charlene Li

Yahoo! Answers launched today at answers.yahoo.com. The service allows users to 1) ask questions; 2) answer them; and 3) discover and browse through all of the answered questions that others have posed.

Here are a few great examples of the helpful (and the esoteric) Q&A taking place.

-         What’s the best microphone or headset for recording a podcast?

-         Where is a good place to live in or near San Jose, CA?

-         Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth?

The service is free, and even more importantly, is really easy to use. Questions are grouped into categories, there’s a search to find more answers, and best of all, there’s a reputation/feedback system built in.

Compare this to Google Answers or specialty sites like Guru.com – both of these sites are paid services, which makes it a lot more cumbersome to use and also raises the stakes for both the asker and the answerer. By keeping it free, Yahoo! keeps it light but also pretty darn useful. Also, the universe expands tremendously with Yahoo’s service – Google says it has something like 500 pre-vetted answerers while Guru.com serves as an intro to freelancers.

How will Yahoo! benefit? Well, I don’t think they were leaving much money on the table by foregoing the ability to charge. In fact, there’s probably quite a bit more opportunity in the form of advertising, especially since advertisers could potentially buy ad inventory in specific categories or target ads by specific keywords.

Two other ways Yahoo! benefits: 1) It encourages users to become active, participating Yahoo! community members; and 2) it creates new content that can be indexed and searched by Yahoo! (as well as other search engines).

One key area to watch: local advice. This has the potential of causing a huge dent in start-ups like Insider’s Guide or Judy’s Book, primarily because it’s so easy to use and doesn’t require forming a formal social network. I fully expect Yahoo! to integrate Answers into Yahoo! Local in the near future.

Free Forrester videos on Social Computing -- and much more

I spoke a few weeks ago at Forrester's Consumer Forum event in NYC about how companies can tap into social computing. I've included the links below to the MP3 and video files (they are FREE!!!), along with several other relevant speeches and Q&A that I thought you'd be interested in. I've included a few summaries as well as the lengths. [Note: the videos aren't quite "videos" (at least, not on my connection), but you'll get the slides that accompany the speeches -- and also a view of me "walking" around the stage!]. Also included are interviews with Paul Tagliabue, Commissioner of the NFL, Greg Joswiak, VP of Worldwide Product Marketing for iPod, Apple Computer Digital Home, and Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of the Imaging and Personal Systems Group at HP.

Charlene Li: "Social Computing -- Bubble or Big Deal?" (29 min. 38 sec.)
Find out how companies can tap into new technologies such as blogs, RSS, viral marketing, and podcasting to develop deeper relationships with consumers — including five rules that companies should follow to successfully grow these new relationships.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=88

Chris Charron: "Innovating In A Consumer Driven World" (8 min. 43 sec.)
Companies must tap into the power of consumer-to-consumer communication by adopting a "consumer-focused innovation" approach in which consumers play an active role in products, services, experience design, and marketing.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=86

Christine Overby: "The Essentials Of Consumer-Driven Innovation" (20 min. 11 sec.)
To turn consumer insights into profits, companies must master "consumer-focused innovation" — in which consumers play an active role in products, services, experience design, and marketing.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=87

Paul Tagliabue (NFL): Q&A with George Colony Part 1 of 2 (5 min. 12 sec.)
Tagliabue provides his perspective on emerging content distribution channels like video on-demand, streaming and downloading, and wireless video. He emphasizes the need to experiment broadly, create new product for every channel, and target the offering . . .
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=89

Paul Tagliabue (NFL) : Q&A with George Colony Part 2 of 2 (4 min 7 sec)
Commenting on the marketing lessons he has learned at the NFL, Tagliabue discusses the need to monitor consumers carefully and regularly — to uncover invisible changes beneath the surface of macro consumer trends — as well as the need to form multiple . . .
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=90

Greg Joswiak (Apple): Q&A with Josh Bernoff (22 min. 0 sec.)
Joswiak explains how Apple changes the rules of the game. He includes a special emphasis on how Apple taps into customer feedback online and in its stores and then combines those insights with its own technology vision.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=91

Vyomesh Joshi, Exec. VP, Imaging and Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packard (3 min. 10 sec.)
Hewlett-Packard's Vyomesh Joshi dismisses "convergence" as an unhelpful word and describes HP's four-pronged strategy for what consumers want in their digital home: content, search, personalization, and community.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=96

The Roll-Your-Own Mash-up Challenge

By Charlene Li

I’m at Web 2.0, which is just a great conference. One of the hot discussions is around mash-ups (def) which combines the functionality from two different applications into a new one. One of the best ones is housingmaps.com, which combines apartment rentals etc., from Craig’s List and Google Maps.

To me, this is the next step in the “social computing”, Web 2.0, or whatever-you-call-it evolution. First, we had personalized content a la RSS-generated content on My Yahoo! At the same time, widgets, which are now hitting their stride, gave us our own customized set of applications on the desktop

The next step now is creating customized applications that can be paired with the content of our choice - yup, mash-ups. (I wrote about this previously in the context of widgets.) But to do that today, you have to know Javascript, Flash, and AJAX. I'm looking forward to the day when there will be simple interfaces into these APIs so that consumers like me (OK, I’ll admit, I’m a pretty geeky, techno consumer) can create our own mash-ups.

This is because I think we’re just at the very tip of the revolution. Imagine if we could tap into the collective creativity of thousands, millions of consumers. How many times have you said to your self, “Wouldn’t be nice if I could just….” And here’s the killer part – what if some built a platform for consumers to do this, and then enabled a way to SHARE those innovations? Some of them would float to the top (thanks to ratings, tagging, etc.) and you could actually start monetizing them. Now that’s tapping into the power of consumers!

So here’s my challenge – what mash-ups would YOU create? Add them to the comments below – I’m curious to see what all you bright minds can come up with!

Let me get the ball rolling. I’m right in the middle of buying a house (offer is on the table, fingers are crossed) and it was a nightmare flipping between the MLS, Google maps and MSN’s Virtual Earth for satellite photos, and Yahoo! Maps for directions (I use their send to phone feature). At this point, let’s make it VERY simple – I just want to take a few of the addresses and plot them on a satellite map to compare their locations. Virtual Earth allows me to do this using their ScratchPad feature, but it was pretty cumbersome. Give me a form-based interface where I can input the addresses and generate a map. The next step would be the incorporation of GeoRSS tags that understand addresses, rather than longitude and latitude. One application – importing my kids’ school directory and plotting the location of their friends so that I can easily organize play dates.

So it’s your turn – what mash-ups can you come up with?

Why Yahoo! buying Konfabulator is more than just about widgets

By Charlene Li

I’ve been on a plane all day (I’m now in hot, muggy Boston) and have been itching to write about Konfabulator’s acquisition by Yahoo!. I’ve been using Konfabulator for the past few months (since I’m not on an Apple) and have been tinkering with a few of the widgets. Widgets are little mini-applications that have primarily one purpose – to get for example, a mosquito report or reports your latest feedback rating on eBay. So why would I want a whole bunch of little things cluttering my desktop? That’s exactly what I was asking as I’ve been adding and deleting widgets the past few weeks!

The problem is I already know what the ultimate widget would be me – something that would get me up and out the door in the mornings. I’d pull together a weather widget, calendar widget, traffic widget and to do widget into one nice neat little app, and then feed it with all of the RSS data streams that I deem relevant. There’s only one small problem -- I don’t know JavaScript! So I am at the mercy of app developers who I hope will take pity on my discombobulated mornings and write the darn app!

But why should I have to wait for developers to do this? This is where I think Yahoo! gets very, very interesting with Konfabulator. As a developer tool, it may have some interesting potential for developing neat interfaces into Yahoo!’s vast stores of content and information. But if Yahoo! can put the power of widget creation into the hands of end-users, it would give us end users the power to not only create custom content streams a la RSS and MyYahoo!, but also allow us to filter, distribute, and combine that data in any way we see fit. There’s already precedence for this in the enterprise space, where JotSpot has taken wikis and built applications on top of classic wiki infrastructure. Proposed RSS extensions from Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. will provide additional structure around which widgets can be built – think shopping alerts.

And even if I never get around to writing the ultimate, personal application, I bet there is someone out there who’s also a busy, working mom/dad AND has some JavaScript skills who wrote a similar program for themselves and shares it in the Widget Gallery. And how about setting up a marketplace where I could write out the specs for my custom widget and put it out for bid?

So this is more than just about little widgets - I think it's potentially taking the power of application development out of the hands of "big" companies. Think of it as open source for the masses.

You can download and try out Konfabulator, which has already been renamed Yahoo! Widgets at widgets.yahoo.com.

Harvard-Yale Game prank shows power of viral/social networks

By Charlene Li

I came back from the Thanksgiving break to find a link from a colleague who had attended the Harvard-Yale Game with his daughter. He sent me to this page which showed the results of a very clever prank – Yale students disguised as the Harvard Pep Squad distributed white and crimson squares to people on the Harvard side, telling them that the sign would spell “Go Harvard”. It actually spelled out “We Suck”. (This prank is reminiscent of the MIT hack at the 1982 Harvard Yale game.)

Now as a Harvard alum, I was quite disturbed that we could have been so gullible. But what intrigued me as an analyst was the fact that the pranksters put up the site in an attempt to sell posters of the prank and hopefully recoup some of their costs.

I contacted Mike Kai, the senior at Yale who organized the prank, to find out what the results were. They made their site live this Sunday morning, Nov. 29th, and sent the URL to a few friends via email and instant messaging. After 12 hours, they had 7,200 unique visitors. Here’s what their results are so far, demonstrating the power of viral networks – and a little media coverage didn’t hurt either!

+ Monday, Nov. 30th: 73,000 unique visitors
+ Tuesday, Dec. 1st: 121,000 unique visitors
+ Wednesday, Dec. 2nd: 280,000 unique visitors

Despite the success of the prank, it turns out Harvard creamed Yale 35-3 and ended the season with an unbeaten 10-0 record. Go Crimson!

Here’s the kicker – it turns out Mike and a few of his friends have been working on a social networking start-up. Called “Scape”, they have a version of the system at Yale which allows students to share media with each other, especially photos via personal blogs. When someone posts information to their blog, their color in the network changes which tells you to go and see what’s new. This is very similar in concept to what MSN Spaces has enabled with MSN Messenger and Hotmail, where the contact card shows the latest blog post from Spaces. Goes to show that great minds think alike.

JotSpot and the making of my own wiki

By Charlene Li

I had a chance to speak with Joe Kraus, co-founder and CEO of JotSpot, about the company. They provide WYSIWYG wikis (what's a wiki?), similar in function to what Socialtext provides. JotSpot does position its service (which is still in beta) with a new bent -- because it's easy for them to tie together "loosely coupled objects", applications can be easily developed.

The example Joe walked through for me is recruiting -- a company can set up pages for individuals being interviewed by the company. They can then add news feeds about the candidate's current employer (and even better, any mentions of the candidate him/herself). But wait, there's more! I could then design an application where I can give the person a rank and set up a script where the candidate is emailed to other managers for review only if they meet certain rank criteria. The scripting language itself was pretty complex, but anyone who can write HTML can get a handle on it pretty quickly (I'm just on the edge of being competent enough with HTML to cause a lot of damage -- I personally wouldn't be able to do the JotSpot scripting in its current state.)

But then I started thinking that I could really use a wiki associated with this blog. For example, I could create a page that listed all of the marketing departments setting up blogs or delivering newsletters via RSS instead of email. Rather than act as gatekeeper for that type of information, it would be updated by the people most interested in the content. Joe said that JotSpot is currently conceived as a paid, hosted service, but that he was getting a few inquiries about doing exactly this. While it's unlikely to be a mainstay of JotSpot's business, I think that there could be an interesting business model for this, similar to what Six Apart has done for blogs (disclosure: this blog is hosted by Typepad, a Six Apart business).

There are two free wiki farm sites that I'll be trying out: SeedWiki and XWiki.com. Stay tuned....

Testing Firefox & Thunderbird

By Charlene Li

I met today with Mozilla Foundation and got their overview of where they're product is heading. For those in the know, Firefox and Thunderbird are Mozilla's open source Web browser and email client offerings, respectively.

i've been using Firefox off and on for the past two weeks and after today will be using it full time for my browsing experience. I'm starting to use Thunderbird today and will post impressions later.

My first take on Firefox is that tabbed browsing is wonderful -- it takes up a lot less space on my desktop (I typically have had a dozen browser windows at a time). But it does take some getting used to as I keep wanting to hit Alt+Tab to get to the other windows. The other feature that I've found very helpful is the CTRL+F function to do a quick search within the page. Firefox scans the page as I type, making it even quicker for me to find what I'm looking for.

I'll also be testing Firefox and Thunderbird on their RSS integration. RSS is a great technology but the current crop of readers are just too complicated for most consumers to figure out.

One last quick note -- if you haven't already, take a look at Spread Firefox which is the marketing site for Firefox. Built on the Civic Space Labs service, Spread Firefox uses much of the technology that helped Howard Dean harness the promotional power of the Net. Most interesting, "affiliates" who sign up to help spread the adoption of Firefox receive points for referrals and downloads, and also have an ID and blog.

If you're interested in trying out Firefox, click on the button for the link (and you'll also be giving me a credit!).