The big picture behind Yahoo! changes
- Posted November 5th, 2008 at 5:56 pm by Ryan
- Categories: General, New Stuff, Screencasts
In reading some of the recent comments on this blog, I’ve noticed that some folks have the impression that some of the recent changes going on around the network (updated profiles for example) are happening for no reason. So I thought I would take a moment to give a refresher on the big picture.
You may remember back in January I posted about Jerry’s presentation during CES. In it he spoke about a more open and social experience for Yahoo! users. He also showed off the concept for Yahoo! Mail incorporating applications that leverage some of the social connections you have with others on the network.
Over the last few weeks there were two major developments that represent big steps in that direction. First we have the changes to profiles. More recently, Jay Rossiter (SVP who is helming the whole “open” thing) announced on Yodel that the doors for developers have officially opened. Here’s a chunk of what he had to say about the plan.
Most obvious will be the social aspects. At a high level, we’re rolling out a social platform that will draw on the hundreds of millions of connections on Yahoo! – everything from random encounters with someone who commented on the same photo as you, to deep connections you have with friends who know nearly everything about you. By using the social contacts you already have on Yahoo! — through Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Finance, Fantasy Sports, etc. — we’ll make those social connections more active and useful. Most importantly, by enabling developers to make your social connections specific to the Yahoo! service you’re using, we believe you’ll enjoy some incredibly unique and creative new experiences that we would never have thought of.
Some developers were able to get a head start on this by participating in the Yahoo! Open Hack Day in September. Developers spent much of the event working on applications that would benefit Mail users, but the concept spreads across the network. Xoopit managed to pull down the best overall award with an application for Mail that gave users the ability to easily browse within Mail for media files that are attached to messages.
I know that this won’t answer all questions people have, but hopefully it’s reassuring to see what some of the stuff is building toward. You can even take a gander at the Mail related section of Jerry’s video for a refresher.
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- 51 Comments
November 5th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I like the direction(s) that Y! is going (esp. w/ Zimbra), however, I’ve been reading a lot of things in the press about it’s future that has me a little concerned. I know the economy is in a downturn and there’s a lot of FUD out there, but I think most of us would like to see Y! succeed and make a better experience for all of us. I think the #1 thing that Yahoo has done not only well, but stellar compared to other companies is Answers. Answers is a perfect example of social networking that is constructive and educational, and they did it really well.
Y! is one of the original dot-coms that really made the web what it is today; it seems to focus more on “content” and “experience” while Google focuses more on nuts-and-bolts, which is nice but doesn’t really give you that look-and-feel that keeps you coming back.
Case in point… my university switched over to Google Apps for campus e-mail; it’s very quick and easy to use, but I’ve yet to see a truly compelling reason or collection of features compelling me away from Y!Mail. Sure, IMAP is nice, but so is Push for my iPhone. Plus, I know that Google says they don’t read your e-mail, but I don’t like the “content” of my e-mail being used to market me stuff. Sorry, maybe I have my tinfoil hat on too tight but I just don’t like anyone having ‘that’ much ‘automatic’ permission to read my e-mail.
I hope that Y! continues to invest in updating/upgrading their current infrascructure, and keep expanding the “openness” of their portal. I’d like to see more Mac compatible technologies, too.
November 5th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I like the new Profiles. Neat. I have also switched from Mail Classic to the new one. The only problem that I have in sending mail is that formerly I could locate a group name from a pulldown, but now I have to guess, since I can’t always remember the group name that I want to use. I usually use Yahoo Messenger in which I can use my cam to chat live, but sometimes I have availed myself to use the YM when in mail with no cam. Convenient sometimes.
November 6th, 2008 at 7:33 am
I was not sure where to post this, ….
I wish you guys would move this advertisement. It borders on
offensive.
“The Acai Berry Diet…” I can not stand trying to read my mail
while avoiding the bare midriff.
November 13th, 2008 at 5:56 am
I agree about the advertisement. There should be a way to close it or something.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
I completely agree! Still thinking about going gold so I don’t have to see all the ads…
November 6th, 2008 at 7:58 am
You know, this is all good and well. Yahoo has every right to design strategies and adhere to them, so as to improve service and “the experience” and to compete with other players on the market and whatnot.
But:
From a user’s perspective, this all has to work, first and foremost, and preferrably work well. Without hassles, with as little glitches as possible. There needs to be a clear, and clearly communicated, structure to it. New elements and structures have to be an actual improvement over old ones, while not interfering with their predecessors for those users who prefer to stick with the old and trusty stuff. And if you do have to take something away from the users, they need to have the assurance and impression that what they get back is an actual improvement. And unfortunately, a lot of the decisions and changes that Yahoo has invoked over the more recent years did not leave that impression at all. Services were abandoned, left broken, fixed when they weren’t broken, worked on with what looked like staggering incompetence, forcibly changed without prior notice or suddenly changed to an unuseable state, services were unreliable a lot of the time or not working as designed and intended at all, and more. The result was, and still is, quite a mess, that sometimes is really no fun to use and most definitely cannot be seamlessly used in an integrated everyday way as it can be expected in these Web2.0 days. Not that other companies in the field don’t screw up, but this is Yahoo, and I simply expect them to perform much better.
I absolutely don’t doubt Yahoo does what Yahoo does for a reason. But *how* Yahoo has been doing it, that’s the crux.
November 6th, 2008 at 8:22 am
I wish Yahoo would focus more energy into combating the porn-bots that have taken over the chat rooms. It is because of that, I hardly use Yahoo’s chat rooms anymore. Nearly impossible to find any real people in there to chat with.
November 6th, 2008 at 9:52 am
I’m excited about the openness coming down the pike for Yahoo! mail. However, I hope the layout or view is more customizable than that demo lead on. I don’t particularly care for the way the new inbox looked in that demo. I love the functionality that they are integrating with maps, and e-vite, and calendar, and all those other social networks and such. That all sounds great, I just didn’t like they way it was all presented. It doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing to me.
Also, I can’t really see how RSS didn’t have much to do with e-mail, but according to this demo finance and yahoo maps does? This doesn’t make much sense. lol. Unless of course this open platform will also bring the return of RSS feeds?
None the less, I am excited for this new platform and for all of these services to be integrated. I think Yahoo! is already doing an excellent job of integration with mail, address book, and calendar. Its so easy to add names, phone numbers, and address from e-mail to the address book. Also, on the calendar ribbon, I really like how if a location is used, a map pops up. These are all great features!
I understand this open platform will be some what “controlled” in that its open to 3rd parties and developers (probably that Yahoo! selects), and yahoo still has some degree of control over the apps they create? Any chance of this being opened to everyone who wishes to develop apps?
November 6th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Steve,
That was a very early concept demo and should be interpreted as simply presenting the idea. The finished product(s) will likely be very different.
Your RSS example is quite possibly the perfect way to think about these changes. With the open platform those will all be optional. It stops being a question of whether or not a feature is popular enough to command that we continue backing it…because users choose the add-ons they want.
The environment will be very controlled at first, but the goal is to eventually open it up much wider.
I’m pitching ideas to the Mail team based on feedback you guys are giving me, and RSS will be included in that list.
-Ryan
November 6th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Ryan,
Thanks for the reply! Add stock ticker info to that list as well! lol. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m really championing for that!
November 6th, 2008 at 10:29 am
I really miss the “searchability” of the member profiles. It seems that now you can only “find” people you already know. I like for example searching for people that live on Cape Cod…now I don’t see how I can do that
November 6th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I have accidently spamed e-mails that i want how do i fix this? I have not been able to recieve these for several months. Thanks
November 6th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
If you find the e-mail in your spam box just remark it as “Not Spam”. then it will move it to your inbox, and you will continue to receive those emails.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
PISSA ANNABA ALGIRIE
November 6th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Jerry may call it “a more open and social experience”, but, I call it feature creep. You take a sleek and high performing website that does one thing well and overload it with crap so that it slows way down and does nothing well.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Tom,
That’s why it’s all optional. We are trying to trim the fat where we can (and sadly for some of the readers here that included RSS feeds) so that the core product is optimized. Then people will have the choice to add additional functionality in the form of applications.
-Ryan
November 7th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Ryan,
You say that Yahoo is trying to trim the fat? Then please explain why our e-mail bandwidth has recently been jammed with useless advertisements inside the Yahoo mail server. I pay good money for my DSL service which included a Yahoo homepage (which I no longer use due to the excessively large advertisement) and a Yahoo e-mail account (which is becoming more and more useless due to the annoying influx of advertisements). How is this trimming the fat?
November 10th, 2008 at 9:49 am
JM,
Not sure what email messages you are referring to. You can control what Yahoo! email comes to you by adjusting your marketing preferences. If you are talking about display ads, those haven’t changed.
-Ryan
November 11th, 2008 at 6:39 am
He is talking about yet another flood of porn-bot spam, now in our email accounts, ever since this ’shift’ started. Its bad and it gets worse every day. I sometimes open my email to ten or more ‘group requests’ from obvious porn bots flooding out any useful emails I may have.
This combined with the lack of Alies profiles (Which was one of the things that made yahoo far superior to other useless IM clients) have turned yahoo into a crappy facebook clone. We don’t want facebook, at least the majority of us don’t. If we did we would get Facebook. Your new system allows more bots than ever to come at us and with all the spam reporting people supposedly do I highly doubt that its all accidental.
And no, none of this stuff you have forced on us is ‘optional’. If it was we would have the OPTION of going back to the old profile system and avoiding this social networking Fiasco until it finally collapsed your company and someone else picked up the peices. I’m sorry but this strategy is flawed in every way it can be and doomed to fail.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Ryan
I think you are trying to play dumb. You know exactly what advertisements I am referring to.
“Dear Verizon Yahoo! member,
We are writing to you about some upcoming changes to your Verizon Yahoo! account.
You will soon begin seeing advertisements in your Verizon Yahoo! Mail service. Advertising allows us to deliver new and innovative services and helps us keep prices competitive. As we remain committed to providing users with the best possible online experience, the new advertisements will be carefully integrated, with the goal of being useful to you. ”
These advertisements are a total waste of bandwidth. It is a coincidence that they started appearing right after Yahoo decided to “trim the fat”?. The advertisement are NOT useful, nor were they carefully integrated. They dominate the e-mail server and make it virtually impossible to read e-mail or compose e-mails.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
JM,
I’m not playing dumb. I’m talking about the inner workings of the Yahoo! Mail system. You are talking about content flowing through the system. Think of it as us building the car, but one of the partners is dictating what channels the radio will be able to tune in.
Ultimately the comparison of message content to to our systems functioning correctly, is a stretch.
-Ryan
November 11th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Terra,
No one has to make use of the networking options available in the newer profiles. That is optional. Users are also free to continue to maintain multiple identities on the Yahoo! network. We just ask that if they want to profile for an alternate identity that they create an additional account.
-Ryan
November 12th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Ryan,
I fail to see why the comparison is a stretch. While the advertisements may not be programmed by Yahoo as part of the system, they were sold by Yahoo and added to the system. The fact remains that they are not only a annoyance, they are slowing down the system. In addition, they are making it virtually impossible to work within the system because they eat up approximately 1/3 of the screen and are constantly opening into the workspace every time an e-mail or folder is clicked on. This is neither useful nor carefully integrated. It is inexcusable.
It also does not change the fact that Verizon Yahoo account users pay for their e-mail accounts as part of their DSL fees. Adding advertisements in addition to this is ridiculous.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Ryan,
I fail to see any stretch in this comparison. While the advertisements that Yahoo has decided to force upon us may not be part of the inner workings of the system, they are counterproductive to a system which operates easily and efficiently. I still find it highly suspect that the appearance of these ads occurred so soon after the RSS feeds were removed from the e-mail system. One piece of bandwidth was removed due to a “lack of use” and another (paid advertising forced upon those of us who already pay for our e-mail account via DSL fees) replaced it.
These ads are also not-as-stated in the e-mail sent to users. They are not useful and they were not integrated carefully. They make use of the e-mail system extremely difficult. They occupy 1/3 of the screen when open and constantly re-open every time a new file or folder is clicked. It has become tedious to compose e-mail and even worse to read e-mails.
In addition, there has been a marked increase in the amount of spam e-mails in the system since these advertisements were sold.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Sorry for the double post (now triple). My computer locked up this morning and the post never appeared until after the second response was submitted.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I’m shocked and disappointed that Yahoo!mail is getting rid of the RSS button on the side bar! Do not get rid of it, at least give us the option of keeping it or not. I love it because I can drag and drop my favorite articles into folders to read later or save forever (thank you unlimited storage). PLEASE SAVE THE RSS BUTTON IN MAIL!
PLEASE SAVE THE RSS BUTTON!!! SAVE THE RSS BUTTON!!! If nothing more than an option to turn it off and on!!! RYAN…. SAVE THE RSS BUTTON!
Is there anyone else who is going to terribly miss this feature?
RYAN, PLEASE DO NOT PHASE OUT THE RSS BUTTON, give us an option to keep it!
November 6th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Nic,
Sorry to break it to you but the decision has been made. It’s not the kind of feature that we can enable by choice. It’s a hefty feature and was simply not used very much. It may appear based on some of the recent comments that it was wildly popular, but the actual usage was very low.
I’m passing along feedback that could help the MyY team better serve you all, so feel free to share that.
-Ryan
November 6th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Ryan,
I have a request for the MyY team. I’d like to see them expand the “Personal Assistant” module to include more than six items. Their drop down menu includes a dozen or so choices and its frustrating not being able to add more than six. I end up adding the additional modules individual which just clutters up the MyY page. I don’t like using different tabs so for now all my content is just piled onto that page and looks very disorganized and ugly. If they could expand the personal assistant module, I feel it would greatly help to clean up that page for many users by reducing duplication in modules.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Why was the feeds thing taken out from the yahoo mail..it was such a nice feature..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
November 7th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Ryan, could you pass along to the MyY team that it would be nice if they expanded the personal assistant module? It’d be nice to have more than six modules. I like how compact the module is. It would help to reduce the amount of clutter on the page!
November 8th, 2008 at 5:14 am
What is with the advertisements on the email page? It is so annoying to have stuff flashing at you, especially womens bodies! Does anyone know if you can rid of it permantly instead of having to keep clicking the arrow to expand the email page. I hate it. It may push me to switch from yahoo.
November 8th, 2008 at 5:28 am
I am saying this as a Yahoo user since it started… Give up everything in hand and work on Spam problem.
Yahoo domainkeys verified trivial spam is something you should be ashamed of. Trust me on that. Give up everything, get a better spam solution, get rid of compromised accounts (it is obvious!) or the Yahoo we all know won’t exist.
November 8th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I have a UK yahoo account and need to transfer my verizon yahoo contacts from USA. Any know how I can do this or how I can get on a specific USA site. The only choices I get to import contacts or messages are UK related.
Thanks
November 9th, 2008 at 3:53 am
One question:
why i can not display the temperature in Celsius units in the new Yahoo mail?
November 9th, 2008 at 5:01 am
I don’t receive email I have addressed to myself anymore or most help links in the yahoo email. What happened?
November 10th, 2008 at 9:49 am
I want to list my pages in Yahoo Directory and I can’t do this
because the server make me children. I am an adult man and I have my age in my profile . This happen every time when I try to add my pages in
Yahoo Directory. WHY ? Please tell me what is wrong !
I want to list my pages in Yahoo Directory.
“Hey kids, you must be at least 13 years old to list your web page in
Yahoo! GeoCities Member Pages.” is the standard message from server
November 10th, 2008 at 9:52 am
in message above YOU show another people avatar, NOT my avatar !
November 12th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
im wondering if yahoo will expand mobile partners
that’ll be better =]
November 17th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Here is a complaint.
For some reason, in the changes, you added the “feature” that, after you have recalled a draft message and sent it, it is automatically erased from the draft folder.
This is a big problem for me. Here’s why.
I often need to send the same message to about 30 people. So as to avoid the spam filters, I send them one-at-a-time. I used to use the draft message for this, simply replacing the “To” address in the message for each new person.
Now, I have to completely re-compose each message, then add the attachment, and then send it. It takes about five times as long as it used to.
You say that Yahoo has some rational reason for the changes it makes.
I would really like to hear the reason for this one.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:51 am
This is to Ryan,
You live in a completely different world…it is clear from your little announcements that you have no idea what it is really like to be a Yahoo mail customer.
From bottom to top, your sytems are defective, when customers report problems, they are never resolved, and Yahoo provides the most impersonal if not non-existent customer service of any major company.
EX: Do not respond to this because we will not reply.
Ryan, you are full of 7448!
The only way to get a problem fixed is to cancel the account!
November 18th, 2008 at 2:55 am
MY EMAIL ACCOUNT WITH YAHOO HAS BEEN LOCKED AND I DONT KNOW WHY. I SHOULD NOT DEPEND ON YAHOO SO MUCH. I NEED TO GET OTHER EMAIL ACCOUNTS FOR MY BACKUP PLAN.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
just keep it simple. so many mail buttons its insane. we just need one. thats my 2 cents. keep it simple.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:35 am
The many features of the “NEW EMAIL” are good, if you could use them. Such as logging into and getting E-mail from your temporary address.
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:17 pm
I cannot open email or send email anymore, for about the last 5 or 6 days. Many of the older messages would not load. I deleted every newer message and then clicked the ones that would not load and selected reload and little by little cleared out the email. The 2 left I want to read and cannot open them. I cleared out cookies and cache. What do you think is going on?
Help please.
Thank you
November 24th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I second the remarks by others complaining about the inappropriate ads on Yahoo Mail. If you have to have ads at least choose ones that are of general interest and not offensive. The current Singlesnet ads of scantily clothed models are not appreciated.
November 25th, 2008 at 2:00 am
An “open network”. In an open network i like to search for new serious contacts and be found by serious contacts.
So anyone from Beograd who filled in a serious profile i like to find, because I want to go there soon.
That was easy: I used “advanced member search” on location and sort of done.
How do I know ever find the yahoo member profiles back who are located somewhere? Your people search now is way way way to limited.
“Open” means that i control how to be found (agreed), no fake aliases (agreed), but totally missing: more advanced ways to search.
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November 26th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Hey there, great blog, wanted to drop a line and let you know there is a great new video on Youtube about Yahoo Mail. Apparently a dog and cat team sing about Yahoo. Visit, what do you think?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaGI-SiU5Pk
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December 5th, 2008 at 10:21 am
why cant there be a friend search on yahoo mail??? i think that would make yahoo mail alot more fun. you will get more younger and some middle age people on yahoo mail.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:33 am
Hi
I that note about advertising I would have thought that you could tailor adverts (if they have to appear) to that individuals yahoo users preferences, interest and hobbies etc which would make the ads much more targgeted and your advertisers would enjoy a better ROI