Semel Out, Yang in as Yahoo’s CEO

Yahoo today named co-founder Jerry Yang as their CEO, replacing Terry Semel who will become a “non-executive Chairman” and serve as an advisor. Susan Decker, formerly Executive Vice President and Head of Advertiser and Publisher Group, was also appointed as President of the company. Before that she was the chief financial officer.

What does this mean for Yahoo? Well I really hope Yahoo pulls things together. They have made big moves toward developing innovative projects, and buying others, but they need to stop sucking their sites dry for all the money they can get. The entertainment sites are especially heinous and flashy, instead of being simple and classy. I’m talking about you Yahoo TV. Yang posted on the Yodel Yahoo blog about his joint vision with Decker. The monetizing part scares me, especially since they have done such a bad job of being tasteful and Google offers most things for free.

A Yahoo! that executes with speed, clarity and discipline. A Yahoo! that increases its focus on differentiating its products and investing in creativity and innovation. A Yahoo! that better monetizes its audience. A Yahoo! whose great talent is galvanized to address its challenges. And a Yahoo! that is better focused on what’s important to its users, customers, and employees.

Sources: Press Release, Yang’s Announcement

Yahoo Mail Going Unlimited

The Yahoo blog brings word that Yahoo Mail “will begin offering everyone unlimited email storage starting in May 2007.” The space will be rolled out over a few months. Great news for Yahoo Mail users, though I’m a bit wary. All companies who offer unlimited anything always have a catch. Not that I don’t trust Yahoo, because they haven’t done too much to lose my trust. Plus, I’m too attached to my Gmail account to switch back to Yahoo Mail after all these years away. Unlimited space isn’t something I need, so I’m more drawn to the site interface and features.

Source: Yahoo! Mail goes to infinity and beyond

Yahoo Pipes Solves All Problems

Yahoo! Pipes is a robust feed aggregator and manipulator. It enables developers to create powerful feeds, performing various operations on them. Everything from counting, filtering, truncating, analyzing content, sorting, and using BabelFish to translate posts. I especially love the ability to create unions of data, or filter non-unique items based on a field such as Title to get unique results.

This is what I have been looking for in the past few weeks. I needed the ability to combine multiple feeds into one feed, and then remove duplicate posts. Nothing currently on the market does that, but Yahoo! Pipes lets me easily set that up. You can check out my BusinessWeek pipe that combines two feeds into one and removes duplicates. I’m still not sure if it works correctly. I am looking forward to using Yahoo! Pipes more once they get better reliability. Yahoo continues to amaze.

Del.icio.us Publisher API Preview Video

The Yahoo! Developer Network blog posted a video of a preview of a new publisher service that lets you access del.icio.us data on your posts, such as the tags people have given your post. Even Feedburner is using the new API for some feeds to show how many times a page has been saved and all of its tags. Check it out.

Update: Here’s the Del.icio.us blog post announcing the new service and features.

Yahoo Ruins TV Listings, Goes Beta with AJAX and Web 2.0 Colors

For a long time I have used Yahoo TV to get my television schedule information. I was able to easily find out what was playing, in a clean and easy-to-read format. There weren’t any unnecessary bells and whistles, until now. Apparently Yahoo TV has been redesigned, and according to the logo it is now in beta. The new site focuses more on television news and video clips from upcoming shows, trying to remake itself into an entertainment portal complete with the over-the-top Flash and AJAX we would expect

Why does every well crafted and reliable site need to be reinvented? The site now uses Javascript everywhere to load sections of the schedule as you scroll the page. The page loads 10 channels at a time, causing a severe delay as each new section is loaded as you go down the page. This makes the page longer and filled with more ads, as there is an ad after each section. As each section of stations loads there is a significant stopage where you can’t even scroll the page and your browser becomes unresponsive as the information is loaded. This happened in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and it is completely unacceptable. Here is a picture of the next panel loading:

With Javascript off nothing shows on the page. There is no message, and no alternative non-Javascript mode. I also wonder if this new page is accessible to the blind. With this new design also comes lots of light blues reminiscent of every “Web 2.0″ site out there. Good job Yahoo, way to be original.

Here are small screenshots of both versions, courtesy of Google Desktop. I couldn’t get a better one of the old tv listings grid, so I chose to keep them both small. The original is on the left, and the beta is on the right. You can see that the original provided more information in less space, and it was extremely fast.

  

My advice to Yahoo: bring back the grid. Until then I will be using AOL Television’s TV Listings or Zap2it’s (which powers AOL’s TV listings), though neither has the fully concise layout that is easy to quickly scan. AOL’s is almost there but they have too much space above the fold and above the TV listings.

Yahoo Live Search in Firefox 2.0

The Yahoo blog brings news that with the release of Firefox 2.0 beta 1 you can now get Live Search suggestions from Yahoo in the Firefox search box. Live Search is an extension of Instant Search. Live Search provides smarter suggestions that Google Suggest just can’t match. Google Suggest matches the first part of the text you enter, while Yahoo’s Live Search will be able to determine what you are looking for. The nice example is that if you enter an acronym they will display the expanded meaning as a search option. Typing “NASA” will return “National Aeronautics and Space Administration” as one of the suggestions.

I have not yet tried the extension and I haven’t tested Firefox 2.0 beta 1. I am usually an early Firefox adopter, but I like to wait for the release candidates that are generally more stable. You can find Livesearch working here at AlltheWeb.

Source: Yahoo! Search blog

Yahoo Messenger Updated, MSN Support Coming

A few days ago Yahoo Messenger was updated to enable free PC-to-PC calls and cheap calls to regular phones. They also added the ability to install useful plug-ins. What is interesting to me is that their website shows that soon you will be able to “IM with Windows Live (MSN) Messenger friends”. That could be big news in the instant messaging scene. They would be able to combine their market shares to better compete with AOL. That could then force AOL into integrating with Google to compete, though it’s unknown how well Google Talk adoption is going. Google has been integrating it more heavily with Gmail. We could all be in for some interesting surprises. What do you think will happen?

Get the Yahoo! Messenger Free Download now.

Yahoo Publisher Network with RSS Feed Ads

The Yahoo Publisher Network now allows members to place ads within their RSS feeds. Ads in RSS allows you to place ads in your RSS feeds that are relevent to the content of your feed in general or to a specific post. The Yahoo Publisher Network is still in beta, but this is a great feature and having it open to all users is something that one-ups Google’s Adsense with their selective rollout of Feed Ads.

Unfortunately, my Yahoo Publisher Network beta account no longer seems to work. It could be due to inactivity, since I have stuck to AdSense, or I could be getting my login info incorrect. Though when I try to recover my login it says that there is no account with my info.

Yahoo Podcasts

Yahoo has released a new beta to allow you to easily find Podcasts of interest to you. The site design of Yahoo! Podcasts is one of the most colorful and creative to come out of Yahoo, and their integration of user-created reviews makes the service that much better. You can easily subscribe to Podcasts as the site opens up a file in your client of choice, either Yahoo! Music or iTunes. Or you can listen to the latest Podcast in your browser (though it hasn’t been working for me; it keeps asking me to download the mp3 instead). They even have a nice to tutorial on how to publish your own Podcast.

The best feature has to be the tagging that allows you to easily add tags to any Podcast, and they size tags by how popular they are. This is a great use of social tagging and it really seems to shine in this service. Go check out a search for “technology” or check out Diggnation.

Yahoo Instant Search

Yahoo Instant Search is a very nice bit of AJAX. You enter in search terms and you will often get a speech box with the top result for that query. And all this without hitting the enter key. Also, if you enter in a company name you will get them as the info, with their Stock symbol linking to financial information. And if you enter a stock symbol you will automatically see the current price and chart for the stock.

Now that is something incredibly useful and easy to use. A lot different from Google Suggest. Instead of suggesting search terms, you get an actual result.