social media @ Yahoo · 2006-03-09 19:40

social media @ yahoo
Bradley Horowitz

manages Yahoo Research group, and Tech Research group, and Developer Network group

don’t make products
make products better

no longer in search and marketplace, now in more corporate role

showing things from their team

yahoo really does care
want feedback
listening and learning

vision: enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge
(search vision)

find: enable people to find what they’re looking for
use: search not for the sake of searching, but to achieve a purpose
share: sharing knowledge with the people you connect with and connecting to people you share knowledge with

expand: knowledge exists mainly in people’s heads… but search is currently distilled formal knowledge (books, web, etc.)

knowledge fusion

FUSE – better search through people

the past of search
creation of Yahoo directory – but didn’t scale
Altavista era – spidering, automation
Google – Pagerank – not looking at pages in isolation

but the industry isn’t done – more comprehensiveness, just scratching the surface of searchable information
relevence
freshness
presentation
trust – make agendas explicit, not compromising trust of users

what’s next?

webmasters determining relevence currently
bad at subjective queries
‘reputable plumber in san diego’
‘a blog i would enjoy’
these are not marginal, gigantic sectors – media, retail

social search – democratize the processes
dial into friends, dial into affinity groups (anime fans for movie recommendations)

(community dynamics slide from his blog)

started blogging to get context of thoughts out

creators synthesizers comsumers dynamic

the vision is to knock down the pyramid and create a culture of participation
need to reduce barriers to entry to participate

explicit and implicit actions

constantly need to explain what makes Flickr special
user-generated content
user-organized content
user-distributed content
user-developed functionality

ESP game that got game players to tag photos
double-blind tagged between two people around the world
fun for labour

no spellcheck, almost no instructions around tagging in Flickr

80% of flickr photos have human-entered metadata

easy to blog photos, [plus Creative Commons]

designed and built as a platform

Flickr clustering
people + algorithms
auto-disambiguation
single tagged photos don’t end up in a cluster
lots of edge cases – but good enough
dynamic – can be skewed or reflects news

interestingness – until recently could only sort by recentness
what is interesting?
it’s magic ;)
natural activity – favouriting, who favourited, who viewed, commented
could have used explicit ranking or voting scheme
but this would have been gamed straight away
didn’t disrupt flickr when introduced [well, it did, until the scoreboards disappeared, still group hoaring]
can surface the good stuff
community in aggregate discovered the best stuff for each other

how does this affect search?
My Web
generally, search is to connect people to web pages
Ny Web is a bookmarking service like delicious
appears at top of search results
now connecting to real people (you know) – even live presence indicated so can IM/communicate with them for more detail

delicious
philosophy with flickr and delicious is to not mess them up
very successful in their own right
same with upcoming
important for these communities to still exist
people should reach Flickr through someone you know using it, not billboards
organic growth is just fine

delicious is a great buzz index
this could percolate to all yahoo users

Yahoo Answers
have been many of these kinds of prodcts over the years
purest distillation of search through people
originated in Korea
size of web index in Korean very small – often didn’t fulfill specific search
huge body of knowledge in korean created
airlifted the concept to Taiwan and now the US
400m users – pretty much someone should know the answer to anything
rating system, acquire points
look at Yahoo Groups – probably even better way of finding answers to questions
maybe even off Yahoo – just need to route questioners with answerers [Stewart Butterfield is the question answerer]
promoted through search results page – so a next step

Hack Yahoo!
internal innovation effort
showing off, feedback, matchmaking
Chad Dickerson
employees have a place to demonstrate what they’re doing
Speaker Series
Weekly Hack Lunch
Hack Day / Hackathon – shut down for a day, teams form and coalesce
thin rules
everyone builds something
present for 2 minutes at the end of the day
some have gone on to be features, some will see the light some day
Cal’s Hot or Not for internal employees
we want to invite Ebay, Amazon, Flock, O’Reilly into these hack days

Failed Hack Prototype

– CheckMates – didn’t manage to get it together in 12 hours, but ran with it after
uses own APIs
proof of concept

(bluetooth screencasting live)
ported yahoo maps to J2ME
uses Flickr social network, puts them on a map
stick a pin in your location, plus mood/presence
that tile is then uploaded to flickr and geotagged, so others can see where you are
hooks in an overlay layer of restaurants etc.
can zoom into the room – private maps
standard maps no good inside venues
not a product, just a prototype
wants someone to build it on a bigger scale
need to dialog about the APIs

Qs:
how important are non-PC devices?
entire business unit (Connected Life) thinking off-browser, cars, cellphones, STBs
YDN and web services let you decouple services from the browser

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