Results tagged “yahoo” from KPAO

I understand how Yahoo wants to make Mail more relevant in this era of the social network. But I don't think jamming social network-esque features into Mail is the way to solve the problem.

The latest version of Yahoo Mail adds yet another bar to the top of the UI, which they call the Filter Bar in the HTML, but I'm calling the Connections bar. It allows you to see only mail from your "connections" in your Inbox. This might be valuable if I had any connections. But I don't. No one does to start off. You have to invite people to connect and they have to accept.



So why would I want to have people as a connection? According to Yahoo:

Connecting with friends and family allows you to:

• Give their messages higher priority in your Inbox
• Automatically keep up with photos they share online
• Much more coming soon!

This is a pretty weak value proposition in my mind. I have to ask people yet again to connect with me. And for expending this social capital with them, I gain two modestly useful features, and a vague promise of more "soon".

The really frustrating thing is that these features can and should be provided to me regardless of whether or not I am "connected" with the other person. Doesn't the fact that I have them in my address book or in my Sent Items folder mean this is a trusted person I am intersted in?

And why add yet another bar to the UI, which reduces the number of messages I can see in my Inbox? Couldn't this filter be integrated more seamlessly into the UI? I suspect this is a case where the UI is in fact there more for marketing reasons than for usefulness or usability.

Thankfully with UI on the web, there are workarounds. I created this GreaseMonkey script to remove this bar and give me back the full view of my Inbox. Maybe you'll find it useful too.

function addGlobalStyle(css) {
    var head, style;
    head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    if (!head) { return; }
    style = document.createElement('style');
    style.type = 'text/css';
    style.innerHTML = css;
    head.appendChild(style);
}

addGlobalStyle('#filterbar { display:none; }');
  

I put this up on Userscripts.org. Get it here.

An implementation of the new Yahoo Boss search engine API, this app scans the top 50 results and comes back with an answer to a who, what or when question. It's pretty funny when it's wrong, but it also gets a fair share of questions right. Not bad for quickly thrown together demo app.

From a design perspective, I love the simplicity yet underlying power. Ask it any question and have a reasonable chance of getting a good (or at least entertaining) answer.

Having nine months of time away from Yahoo has given me a bit of perspective. Things really gelled for me as I was listening to Jeff Housenbold (CEO of Shutterfly) on the Stanford Entrepreneurial podcast. In his Tips for Career Success, #3 is "Go where the money is made in the company."

Yahoo makes its money from advertising. To make money in advertising on the web, you need to have "inventory" (popular web sites that a lot of people visit). But you also need a way to sell those ads. You need tools like campaign management, analytics, budgeting, reporting, A/B testing, and a whole host of others that are compelling, easy-to-use, and generally encourage advertisers to spend as much money as possible. In short, you need to meet the needs of advertisers, who in turn will give you money.

And as far as I knew in my three years at Yahoo, we weren't doing that. I worked on the inventory side of things in the groups that built Mail, Messenger, Photos, Groups and 360. The primary exposure we had to ad sales was the requirement to include space in your design for IAB standard ad units.

The people I worked with on these inventory products were some of the best and brightest out there. Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, Delicious, Front Page and (if I do say so myself) Messenger are truly best-in-class services. Why couldn't the same be said for our ad sales tools? Why didn't Yahoo spend equal time promoting the ad sales side of things internally? Why wasn't I or more importantly my superstar peers actively recruited to go work on the ad sales tools, the very products that most directly generated money for the company? Inventory is important, but from where I sit now, generating ad sales is even more important. If you have the sales, you can easily create or find the inventory on the web.

A colleague of mine in research wanted to become a product designer. My advice to him was to go over to the ad sales group where there was a ton of low-hanging fruit and a ton of opportunity to tangibly improve Yahoo's financials. I only now realize how bad that sounds. Why would Yahoo treat such an essential piece of the business a second-class citizen? Why should that be the entry point for a rookie designer? Why isn't that where the rock star designers go after paying their dues on the "lowly" inventory products?

A friend of mine who was a PM at Yahoo shared his story of going down to LA to visit the Search Ad Marketing team. He was shocked. He said it was huge; at least as big as the main HQ; maybe bigger. It's the biggest secret Yahoo is keeping from its own employees.

This in contrast to Google. When I interviewed there in late 2004, they made it quite clear there were two main groups: end-user web sites, and advertiser (plus internal) tools. The groups were equally well respected. Both groups got similar exposure in internal communications. Employees moved between the two regularly.

Brad Garlinghouse got it partially right with his peanut butter manifesto. But it's not just redundant inefficiencies that are hobbling Yahoo; it's also inequalities in their product lines. Yahoo needs to make ad sales tools a high-profile, career-accelerating -- and yes even sexy --job where the best and the brightest vie for limited positions on great teams, and the ones who succeed are known and revered by all throughout the company. I hope the new organization is geared up to fix this, but from what I've seen in the press, it unfortunately doesn't look like it.

If you're a Yahoo employee, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Or even what it should be today. Michael Arrington's article in TechCrunch sums it up well:

[Yahoo's CEO Jerry] Yang was not prepared for perhaps the one question that every CEO should be ready to answer at all times: "What is the business of Yahoo?" He was all over the place. He said their core focus included "home page, mail, search, and mobile." He also said "We can't be all things to all people. We have become much more focused," before taking about other areas of focus at Yahoo, including advertising, social networking and their new open strategy.

[President Sue] Decker stepped in and tried to distill their core message, repeating "we focus on homepage, search, mail and mobile" but then went on to talk extensively about advertising, including a new display advertising product that the company will launch in Q3 this year.

And another thing. Jerry claims that he "bleeds purple", but I challenge you to show me where on the web Yahoo! is actually branded purple. It turns out only on the investor relations site and sort of on the corporate blog, and those aren't even a part of the yahoo.com domain!

It's sad but true. There are a lot of smart, passionate people at Yahoo!, but there is definitely a dearth of focus and leadership at the higher levels. And as Yoda would say, "that is why you fail."

I know a lot of my techie friends swear by Gmail, and I admit there's a lot to like about it. Their spam filter is top notch, it's very fast and responsive, the keyboard shortcuts make it easy to get around, and of course it has great search. But the design is way to antiseptic for my taste. And while the threaded view is great for mailing lists, I perfer the old date descending view for my personal mail.

I always liked the Yahoo! Mail beta. It's a bit slower, but the search is great and one feature I love that Gmail doesn't have – the ability to switch away from a message you're writing to go find a piece of info from another message to include. But the ads always bugged me. I mean really bugged me. Until now.

I switched to Firefox, and one massive advantage is their vibrant plug-in platform. I installed GreaseMonkey and searching on UserScripts, found this add-on that removes the ads from Yahoo! Mail. With this tweak, Yahoo! Mail is now my top choice for web mail.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.