Many of you who read this blog have gotten to know me as Yahoo’s “RSS Guy” but my official role has been a lot broader than that. I’ve lead Yahoo’s Personalization team and have worked to ensure that personalization is woven into all that Yahoo does, that you enter info once (like where you live, your favorite stocks, what feeds you like, etc) and Yahoo does the right thing on your mobile device, on the TV, and on any of our web properties. In addition, my team has launched adaptive personalization like Movie Recommendations and automatically changing Yahoo’s front page based on the parts of Yahoo you use (and there’s more in that regard that you haven’t seen yet).
But personalization isn’t all that I’ve worked on at Yahoo. Many people still call me the “My Guy” since I’ve worked on My Yahoo! on and off over the years, and once in a while you’ll find someone who still refers to me as the “Yahoo Search guy” referring to the years that I ran our search business. Yahoo has allowed me to try different jobs over the years, keeping my experience here fresh, and honestly, that’s a big part of why I’m still here.
And, well, it’s time for a change again. I’ve just started a new job: leading Yahoo’s Advanced Products Group. In the new job, I’ll become part of Bradley Horowitz‘s Product Strategy Group and sit along side people like Caterina Fake, Chad Dickerson at YDN, Ellen Salisbury at Y! Berkeley Research Labs and lots of other great people. And, I’m lucky to be joining a team of amazing people. APG is the group that launched Yahoo! Podcasts and that is working on some really, really cool stuff (that I can’t tell you about).
I’m really excited about the new job and I can’t wait to tell you about all the great work that this team is doing. And, I’m sure it’ll take a while before people stop calling me the “My Guy” or the “RSS guy”, and I’m ok with that. I’m really proud of the work I did on My Yahoo, Personalization and RSS, now its time to be proud of a whole new set of stuff.