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Jeremy Zawodny posted (in reaction to Reading the Google Tea Leaves) his opinion that Google is building Yahoo 2.0.:

it’s as if someone decided to re-invent more and more of Yahoo’s popular services in random order, giving them a fresh user interface, less historical baggage, and usually one feature that really stands out (such as Gmail’s storage limit or Google Talk’s use of Jabber).

Dave Winer responded quite astutely:

Very clever, and there’s a lot of truth to it, but watch out, that’s not a very good place to be. That’s how Microsoft came to dominate the PC software industry…. It’s better to produce your own 2.0s…

I really look at the whole thing another way. Google is replaying Yahoo’s playbook circa 1996. Back then, we simply looked at what people were searching for and then built services that they wanted. Filo called the query logs “our to-do list”.

I tend to think that we’ve got a head start in understanding users and how they react to the way we roll out new features. We got to be the #1 way that people read RSS by knowing how the masses wanted to subscribe to new info, we broke convention in the way RSS was consumed (it doesn’t have to only be in a mail metaphor) and it paid off for us.

If Google really is trying to do what we did 10 years ago, of course they are gonna try to be “Yahoo done better” and that’s something to really watch out for. Yahoo! Maps was a leading product and Google launched Yahoo Maps 2.o – and you all loved it. That sucked for Yahoo. Now we launched a better maps, but we should have launched the new Yahoo Maps before they did.

So Dave – you are right. If Yahoo’s gonna win, we need to take our 10 years of experience and launch our own Yahoo 2.0 well before MSFT and GOOG know what’s happening.

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In my job, I get to meet lots of people at startups and big companies, and more and more I’m reminded of the fact that successful companies are all about the people. Back in my startup days, VCs and advisors always looked really closely at the team and the people as a indicator of potential success. At the time I really didn’t understand, but now that I’m exposed to as many companies as those VCs see, I get it.

When I first started at Yahoo seven years ago I knew I walked into a very special place. I realized that I had just walked into a company full of incredibly smart people who were practical and passionate and could execute. It took me a while to get comfortable and to work at their level, but I knew we were gonna do lots of great things.

Now when I look at startups, I look to see if they have what I first saw in Yahoo:

  • Company A – This company got a lot of initial buzz about its founder and the area they were entering into, and got a bunch of initial usage from folks “in the know”. Since then though, the company hasn’t seemed to take off. When I met their head of BD at a conference (one of about only 10 employees), he struck me as someone who just wasn’t very happy in his job, wasn’t very excited about the product and overall really wished he could be doing something else. On top of that, he struck me as not really “getting” all the great things we see transforming the web. Here’s a guy that should be exciting and passionate, but I was left feeling like this company wasn’t going to be the darling we all expected it to be.
  • Company B – This company really doesn’t have the buzz of company A, but is plugging away at doing interesting things and my guess is that they are hoping to be acquired by Yahoo, Google or MSN. I had a similar experience though when I met their BD guy. He just rambled on about things that made it clear that he really didn’t understand the space. I later met the CEO and other members of the team and felt that they do have some good folks, so my verdict here is mixed. Overall, their performance has been mixed. Their products get a little attention, but don’t seem to ignite a lot of passion from users or the community. Is the root cause that they have hired a mixed bag of people?
  • Company C – This company seems to be taking off like a rocket. From the moment I met the people from this company I was impressed. They all were talented, passionate and execution oriented and they reminded me of how I felt when I started at Yahoo: they were all smarter than me. One by one as I met these guys it was clear that this company was going places. As they’ve hired, I’ve met their new employees and they are of the same high caliber as the others. This company’s results have been stellar, they are innovating like crazy and I’m now always keeping a close eye on what they are up to. They’ve figured out the formula.

I guess the moral of the story is that the most important thing anyone can do in their job is to hire the best people. People who are passionate, focused, smart and more than capable. I’ve been lucky to find such people for my team at Yahoo! If I ever were to go down the startup path, hiring the best people would be my #1 priority, because I want to end up like Company C.

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Ok, so I so kinda understand why people would spam blog comments. They hope to drive traffic to their site by either increasing pagerank or getting people to click on the links. But in the last few weeks, I’ve been getting tons of very similar comment spam. They all come from different IP addresses but list a jibberish sentence in the comment:

It’s been a long time since I so enjoyed reading posts in the net. Two thumbs up! thins that excited you at 14, substances that cure you , my parents didnt told me about it

Those last 3 phrases have links that go to Sun, Adobe, Panasonic and Yahoo! None of these companies (I hope) would be hiring someone to increase their PR, so I’m completely baffled as to what’s going on.

The only crazy idea I can come up with is that the spammers are using some sort of learning technique to figure out what will go through filters and what will get blacklist. Once they learn the technique, then they swap the URLS? Does anyone know?

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I have a birthday coming up in a few weeks and Craig and I sat down to set up an Evite for the party. In the process however, I came across one of the worst error message schemes ever and just had to point it out.

We couldn’t remember if Craig already had an account, so we just started to register again. It was actually a simple registration form and we quickly hit submit. Then:

You have entered invalid data. Please check the errors below.

The error below was telling us that the email address was already used. We fixed that and moved on.

But I came back later and tried a bunch of different things on the form: 1) leaving fields blank 2) typing the wrong password to log in 3) using an existing email address and all of them led to: You have entered invalid data? Come on…in one sentence you blame me, you use a technical term (data) and you call what I typed “invalid” even if its just that I accidentally forgot to fill out a field.

I’m picking on evite a little here, but it’s a supposition I see on too many web sites today: its the user’s fault. And maybe it is, but it’s time to use that sage old advice: “it’s not what you say, but how you say it”. Just take a little time to make your error messages helpful and appropriate for whatever the error – it’s not that hard and it’ll make me feel that you are actually on my side.

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The Yahoo! Maps team just released a new beta (and a great new set of Maps APIs) that is very cool.

At first, I wasn’t sure about the idea of doing some stuff using AJAX and a big chunk using flash, but after using it for a while, I’ve really grown to like it. It’s a HUGE improvement over old Yahoo Maps (and I really liked Y! Maps before). This release finally helps bring us up to snuff with the interactivity that GMaps had and then adds a bunch on top. I tried it on Mac Safari and Win IE and both worked well for me.

Some of my favorite things:

  • Point-to-point-to-point driving directions. Instead of just point A to Point B, you can set up a route (great for “lets grab lunch then go to the amusement park” type stuff)
  • integrated local search – type any search term and “find on map”. You can also browse through stuff. In old maps they used to call this “SmartView”, but they’ve integrated this with the new Y! Local, so the data is even better.
  • The APIs – now you can embed a map right into your page (only the other guy’s APIs used to let you do that). And beyond simple integration, you can add all sorts of controls to your site to control the map as well.
  • You can actually bookmark a map. Drag around the map, find your spot and you can bookmark it where you left off (also can email it too). I dragged my map all the way to Chicago where my family lives, zoomed in and bookmarked it. Those other guys can’t do that!
  • Drag, zoom, scroll -all the interactivity is there that you’d expect. use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom; drag the map; use that little box in teh corner to move pretty far away. nicely done.

The APIs look really robust, I’m not a wiz like other folks, but I was able to quickly embed this map for where I work. Drag it around; click on the marker to see my picture. Kinda fun (if I could do this so easily, I hope people with talent can do some cooler mashups).

#mapContainer { height: 250px; width: 370px; border:1px solid gray;}

// Capture the user mouse-click and expand the SmartWindow
function onSmartWinEvent() {
var words = “
Scott at Yahoo!“;
marker.openSmartWindow(words);
}
// Create a lat/lon object
var myPoint = new YGeoPoint(37.416384, -122.024853);
// Create a map object
var map = new YMap(document.getElementById(‘mapContainer’));
// Display the map centered on a latitude and longitude
map.drawZoomAndCenter(myPoint, 3);
// Create a marker positioned at a lat/lon
var marker = new YMarker(myPoint);
// Add a label to the marker
marker.addLabel(“Me“);
// Call onSmartWinEvent when the user clicks on the marker
YEvent.Capture(marker, EventsList.MouseClick, onSmartWinEvent);
// Display the marker
map.addOverlay(marker);

var navWidget = new NavigatorWidget();
// Add the Navigator Widget to the map and display it
map.addWidget(navWidget);

Congrats to the Maps team. Be sure to check out their blog post and they have a mailing list going for comments.

UPDATE: So I guess there are people doing smarter things than my silly map. Jeremy blogs about a demo I saw floating around at work. Seems like a bunch of folks like Chad Dickerson, Ed Ho and a bunch of others did a great events viewer. Toni did a fun silicon valley map, and it oddly places the center of the map very near to yahoo. 😉

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Another off-topic post today, but I couldn’t resist (it does involve my old profession though)

Top of the RockToday, for the first time in over 20 years, the “Top of the Rock” re-opens in New York City. The “Top of the Rock” is the observation deck on the top floor of 30 Rockefeller Center and since 1933 was one of only two places (the other was the Empire State) to see NYC from above until the World Trade Center was built.

Even though the observation deck wasn’t open when I lived in NYC, I was lucky enough to get a personally escorted tour of the roof deck when I worked at NBC in 1991. We were planning to do a shoot with Tom Brokaw up there and so the building manager took us up a crickety old elevator. From the moment the doors opened it was clear that this was an art deco masterpiece (albeit covered in two inches of dust and debris). The interior lobby and restaurant area was a showcase of 1930s art deco style with marble floors, period details and large windows that opened out onto a stunning roof deck. I wish I could remember more of the details to share them with you, but I remember feeling like I had stepped into the past and was able to get a special peek at something very special.

Top of the RockOnce out on the deck the view was magnificent. To the north you have a great view of Central Park which is only a few blocks away and relatively unobscructed. To the South you have a clear view of the Empire State and midtown unfolding before you. While not as clear of a view as it must have been in the 30s, you can still see both the Hudson and East Rivers as well. I’d argue that this is the best view of NY to be had (and of course the building manager thought so too).

That visit excited me so much that I ended up reading a bunch on 1930s deco architecture afterwards and the experience stuck with me for a long time. I can’t tell from the pictures, but I hope they kept a lot of what I saw. I’ll have to go back next time I’m in NYC and if you make it, be sure to tell me what you thought.

Photos Courtesy of Rockefeller Center Archives

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A good friend of mine is a French translator who also does voice overs for French language TV commercials, training videos, etc. At lunch this weekend, he told me a story about a client that made me think about how overly US-centric most companies still are. Most companies these days do business in every market worldwide, so why is this still an issue? The story:

My friend was recording a voice over for this company – let’s call it “4tel” – and he ran into the issue of how to pronounce the name of the company when it is spoken aloud. He chose to pronounce the way his audience would upon seeing the logo: “quatre – tel”. This company chose to name itself with a numeral and surely they must have thought that the numeral would be pronounced appropriately in each language (vier-tel, cuatro-tel, quattro-tel, etc). Wouldn’t you think?

Well, of course not. “4tel” made him re-record the entire spot and say “Four-Tel”. Do they expect that non-english speakers will just instantly make the connection between a written “4tel” and a spoken “Four”? What if they person hearing it doesn’t know english numbers? That’s still a possibility in many markets.

It shows either a lot of arrogance on the part of a US based company or just complete ignorance when they named their company. Either way, this isn’t a good way to globalize your brand or your products.

So what is the right thing to do? Personally, I’d prefer to either take the ambiguity out (avoid numerals), or let the locals say it how they want. MSFT has the new XBOX 360 and YHOO has its own 360. I wonder how those will be spoken aloud “trois cent soixante” anyone?

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VC Rick Segal has a great post about how to treat employees who are leaving your company.

Over the years at Yahoo! and at other companies I’ve inevitably had to watch some great team members move onto new and different careers, take time off or whatever. When people left, I did try to make them feel that they would be missed and most of the time tried to organize a bon voyage party/lunch for them. But until Rick’s post, I never really thought about the exit interview process and how the company handles these folks (It’s time for me to learn).

Rick’s post also fits into a school of management thought that just really should be common sense: treat your people like people, not like an “asset” or a “resource”.

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John Furrier at podtech.net interviewed me last week at BlogOn for his InfoTalk series.

We actually cover a pretty wide variety of stuff about RSS from how to make it easier, to my favorite Cub Scout RSS feed, and on to our research.

I usually hate how my voice sounds on these sort of things, but I managed to not cringe when I first hit play on this, if you’ve got 17 minutes, check it out.

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If you are reading this, it is likely that you are interested in some of the work we are doing at Yahoo! in the RSS space. We’ve got an opening for an experienced, dedicated, bright product manager who wants to make great things happen here at Yahoo!. The official job description is below, the best way to submit a resume is by using the online submission form on the Careers at Yahoo! listing for this job.

UPDATE: It seems that people are having a problem with the online site. I think the submssion form doesn’t like deep links. You can email me at scottg AT yahoo-inc DOT com.

Yahoo! has been at the forefront of the RSS revolution, both publishing millions of feeds and being the single biggest destination for RSS consumption, with millions of users reading feeds on My Yahoo! everyday. We’re looking for an engergetic and results-oriented product manager to help properties around Yahoo! take advantage of the possibilities created by RSS, Atom and open content in the Web 2.0 world. As a Product Manager for RSS, you will work directly with engineering, design and other teams around Yahoo! to define and execute these integrations.

 

The right candidate will have at least 3-5 years of product management experience online. You’ll have familiarity with the competitive landscape; strong organizational skills; a hands-on attitude; an amazing attention to details and the ability to work across a variety of teams. Experience building and working on platforms a plus. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, knowledge of internet standards, and a BA/BS are required.

If you meet the criteria (and please make sure you do) we look forward to hearing from you.

Email me at scottg AT yahoo-inc DOT com.