How Not To Blog ?

PantiesPantiesPanties is one of the more tame posters of photos on Flickr. Their photos are of clothed women who are wearing... panties.

The new Flickr, now owned by Yahoo, is being a bitch for asking them to, essentially, take down their photos from public consumption.

I talked about this on March 28 in "Flickr isn't really a Yahoo family-type site, is it?" but I was thinking about the photos of penises that were next to photos of clowns. (Or clowns with penises.) Marking it as 'adult' is all that should be done.

Flagging photos as being adult is a good thing to do for Yahoo. Censoring the photos completely (and photos that are more "PG-13" than "R") is a fucking dumb idea. Kids have seen worse things on network television.

Seems like the whole nation is turning into a churchgrounds. Not because most people are so religious, but because people are becoming too afraid to do anything. Censorship is facism's best friend.

If you have a Yahoo! email account and receive spam from large companies, you're probably out of luck if you are relying on the "Spam" button to cancel out future messages from these entities.

If most other Yahoo users don't click on "Spam" for emails from that sender, your clicking most likely won't work.

I've clicked on "Spam" at least a dozen times for one sender that was obviously spamming me. There are several more from which I continue to receive unsolicited commercial emails. Many large companies spam. That's a fact. Yahoo should do something about this. How many messages do we get from "a trusted sender" that are sent "on behalf of our partners"?

Personalized spam filters, Yahoo? Can you allow me to select 'Spam' for any message that I want to block out the sender in the future? Going into options and selecting the message filters command is not only an inconvenient process (considering how prevalent spam is) but it oftentimes doesn't work no matter how many wildcards I use.

The HNTB spam solution works great. Can't Yahoo think of something similar to reveal senders who cause your email to be spammed?

Look for Google to work out a deal with Yahoo! in the next 4 weeks.

A partnership will be monumental. It will be the biggest internet-related story since Netscape. Momentum... check! Enthusiasm and coverage... check! New technology via collaboration... check! It's the only way the next internet will be born on a mass scale (and thus, the only way either of them can survive the next 5-10 years).

This article from the Internet Stock Blog talks about the back and forth competitve environment for email and other services between Yahoo and Google. It also mentions MSN's role in the arena. Some interesting tidbits in there.

There's an article over at Online Journalism Review that talks about Yahoo news' use of RSS.

It gets interesting towards the end in the "Taking RSS to the masses" section

"If you look at how we've integrated RSS into Yahoo News, we're not actually using those three letters very much," Gatz said. "So you look at it, and it says what would you like to add to your political news, here are some political blogs. Would you like to add CNN or MSNBC onto your news page? The fact that it happens in XML or RSS isn't the important thing. Most of the users don't want to have to figure that out."

See the Yahoo! Search blog for more info

We're releasing a new index tonight. You should see a lot of new content in the index as well as fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches.

Thanks, Razvan Antonescu

Direct marketers will love the new Yahoo! 360. It appears that someone could easily create a script that will extract the Yahoo user ID from the "Friends" pages, and send out highly targets emails to 360 users based on their interests found in their profile (or just plain old non-targeted spam).

Just hold your cursor over the "send an IM" text to see what I mean. [Update: disabled!]

Hey, there, Marc Canter. Do I have a good deal for you!

[Update: 4:20PM]

Randy Farmer says on his blog that the 'leaked' Yahoo ID problem has been fixed. First day out of the super private arena and into the elite arena, and a big bug has already been squashed.

Wow.. I'm almost impressed. Except that it's not 'fixed' at all. The links have simply been disabled. Well, better that than the other.

Glad to know the good folks at Yahoo read this shit.

Click the links below to see more Yahoo 360 blogs

Niall Kennedy, Jee, Kevin Marks, Frederique (81 friends, so you can view more blogs and profiles, etc., from her spot).

Take a look at a sample friends page and groups page.

It all looks so bland and boring. They could do so much more. (Why are these companies so afraid of taking intelligent risks?) But, for a beta, there's lots of room for improvement.

If Yahoo! wants to maintain its family image past its purchase of Flickr, then it should do something about all the x-rated photos on the site that are easily-accessible.

Meanwhile, my photos (as a new user) are still waiting to be approved. They're checking to see if I'm posting x-rated photos and/or advertising!

Most of Yahoo's users are stupid when it comes to the internet and the web. In fact, I think they're only second in terms of numbers of idiots on the internet in their database, after AOL. Yes, I'm a Yahoo user, and I love Yahoo (except for the time when one of their email servers blew up and I couldn't access my account for about 3 years).

Yahoo should re-consider their strategy for 360 and related offerings.

They can't just roll out a sophisticated suite of products that include blogs, RSS, social networking, etc.

360 should first determine how stupid the user is, then present the appropriate menus to them. Not just "simple" and "advanced" menus, either. In addition to an algorithm that queries what they know about each user from its database to figure out how stupid that user is, they would do well to introduce stupid users to 360 the following way.

After signing in, display something like:

I want to...
Be able to upload and share my photos
Keep a personal log and share it with my friends and family
Write reviews of [whatever]
View my friends and their friends in a network
etc...

Not everyone knows what a blog is (only about 30% of Americans have an idea). Of these I would guess half only think they know, and another half actually know what they themselves can do with it. You can't just say "Click Here To Blog!" or "Join this Network" to your userbase if You're! Yahoo!

Hide the complexity from most of your users, while allowing more technical users to easily select what they want. Make sure, however, that the idiot always has the opportunity to use the system more intelligently. Truly customized user menus and user interfaces are the future, man.

I don't think 360 will be a kick-ass new service in its present or near-term incarnations. It's still in beta but I am pretty sure Yahoo will do its best to make it work, as 360 seems central to its new strategy of maintaining/increasing user stickiness.

You can now check out the Yahoo! 360 beta. Here's how:

1) Login to your Yahoo account

2) Go to the following location

The link may not last for long.

So far 360 has the following user menu: Home, My Page, My Blog, My Friends, Mailbox, Invite, Search, Settings

On the left panel, there are the following member-related options (social network menu): Top Page, Blog, Friends, Lists, Reviews, Groups

You can view a larger screenshot here.

The earliest post from the above-accessible blog is from Friday, Oct 22, 2004 - 11:37am (PDT) titled "Day two..." and talks about Project Mingle (360).

Information overload will gradually kill off web search. The top 10 results will no longer be what most people are looking for.

You want to tell me that my neighbor's search for "weather models" is the same as mine? I don't think so...

In its place, your mama predicts, will be information aggregators. RSS aggregation is headed in the right direction. But really useful aggregators will serve me information in many different ways. They will be a substitute for my decision-making processes - this can be something as simple as providing me with an extensive and customizable set of user options.

Gone will be the days of ma and pa going to Google to search for what they're looking for (prescription drugs, for example). Their Pain Relief community members will feed links to them on their personalized Yahoo 360 (v2, I hope) interface. Most will consume (such as internet users do), some will feed, Google will turn into Froogle, and everyone will be happy.

The only way Google will survive is to rebrand itself as a content-sharing portal.

But, alas, it doesn't want to be a "portal" at all. It doesn't want to tie any of its many services together in a coherent way like Yahoo is doing (especially with 360). It's doing everything portal-like while at the same time screaming that it's not a portal, doesn't want to be a portal, and isn't competing with portals.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Schmidt said Google would not seek to turn its website into a broader internet portal, a move that would take it into more direct competition with Microsoft and Yahoo.

How stupid is that? We're not talking AOL, here. We're talking about a new generation of content-sharing portals, a la Yahoo 360 on steroids. I'm sure Google knows that the average user spends less than 3 minutes on Google. For Yahoo, it's more than 5 times that.

Rule #1 at Google should be "Don't Be Stupid", not "Don't Be Evil". Lately they seem to be having trouble with both.

Google is already a portal. Their unwillingness to communicate what they already are to consumers (yes, consumers) will be their downfall. Google's Picasa, desktop search, GMail, Hello, Blogger, Keyhole, Adsense, Adwords, web search, news, mobile services, local search, discussion groups, freelance expert answers, catalog directory, their soon-to-be-released browser, and a whole lot more will show up at the bottom of Google searches if they don't follow in the direction that Yahoo is going.

Google needs to actually spend real money marketing themselves and communicating to you and me. Google's old strategies will not continue to work indefinitely. No one is talking about Picasa, Google's Flickr-like offering. People are talking excitedly about Flickr itself.

Advertising accounts for near 98% of Google's revenues. This would scare the fuck out of any reasonably intelligent company. Google should be ashamed to focus on search so much.

Why?

Not just because MSN and Yahoo are re-developing their search algorithms, but also because RSS feeds and other aggregators will kill Google searches (and revenue). Yahoo knows this and is embracing RSS and I'm sure will popularize it even more and begin to use it in ways that Google can't imagine. Google search will continue to remain as relevant as it is today, but RSS and other types of feeds (that effectively bypass search) are even more relevant. The only way to handle this is to become a content-sharing portal.

Where's the ?Add to My Google? button? Wait... where is My Google?

Yahoo is forcing a reluctant Google into being a portal but, alas, only Yahoo sees the big picture.

Now that Google is a publicly-owned company, it is mandated to grow, grow, grow. I guess it has no interest in remaining competitive. Google needs to diversify its revenue base, for one. But first it needs to get its head out of the sandbox.

Is Ask Jeeves really worth $2 billion?

Ask Jeeves owns Ask.com, Excite.com, and iWon.com. It also effectively purchased Bloglines through its purchase of Trustic in February.

Yahoo got a much better deal when it bought Overture in 2003 for $1.6 billion. For that purchase, it now has more than double the profits every quarter than it would have had otherwise.

However there's a bigger picture here, and I'm sure Barry Diller sees that.

They both realize that the future lay in bundled social services that tie together social networking, photo-sharing, blogs, and other content. If you want to retain your users, this is the way to go.

They seem to want to make personal blogs and the sharing of media as popular as email. They could even be thinking of these new services as a type of replacement (or enhancement) of email. I love email but, really, there's got to be a better way. And who isn't annoyed by spam? They could market these services as a spam-free, dynamic way to communicate and get everyone signing up. (No, most people in the US don't even know what blogs are, silly. You're in your own little world.)

Yahoo has Overture for PPC, search, mail, and is putting a new spin on blogs with its 360 service. It's also coming out with a publisher network to rival Google's Adsense. It has also recently acquired Flickr, a photo-sharing service (I'm guessing they paid $200 million, which fits in with previous purchases and the kind of value that Flickr brings to the table).

Google has Adwords for PPC, search, Blogger for blogs, GMail, and Adsense for advertising on blogs and other smaller sites.

Microsoft is coming out with its own blog offering, MSN Spaces, Hotmail, and will have MSN Adcenter (an Adsense rival).

Now, Barry Diller, a bisexual, gets to swing both ways. He also purchased ZeroDegrees, a social networking site, in 2004. That, on top of IAC's many other offerings.

And soon, there will only be a few of these companies around - those that can afford to keep up.