Yahoo Refreshes, Upgrades Some Products
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The company said it is investing heavily in updating its entire platform -- including redesigning its home page, strengthening the overall site engine and building more data centers to improve overall performance.
SUNNYVALE, Calif.-Yahoo,
whose user base has been either flat or slowly slipping, depending upon whose
research you believe, announced some upgrades in its Web products Sept. 16 that
it hopes will help regain some luster.
The venerable Web services provider, still one of the most relied-upon Websites
in the world, didn't show analysts and media all that much at its "Product
Runway" event at its corporate headquarters here.
Mainly, the message was that the company is investing heavily in updating its
entire platform-including redesigning its home page, strengthening the overall
site engine and building more data centers to improve overall performance.
In fact, Yahoo will unveil its latest state-of-the-art data center, located
just outside Buffalo, N.Y.,
on Sept. 20.
Yahoo also said it will power free WiFi service in Starbucks Coffee stores
beginning this fall in the United States.
Naturally, users who log on to the free networks will be directed to Yahoo
content tailored to their local market.
Demonstrations at the event on Sept. 16 included Yahoo Groups, Yahoo
Citizen Sports, a revamp of its e-mail service and additional speed in its
search engine.
New Yahoo product strategy chief Blake Irving said Yahoo Search is now
penetrating more Websites and generally displaying larger listings of results.
Of course, most of this improvement is due to the new Microsoft Bing power
plant.
Yahoo-No. 2 behind Google with about 17 percent of the search market share in
the United States-and
Microsoft signed
a 10-year pact in July 2009 to share the technology and the ad revenue.
Within the next few weeks, Yahoo will add update access on its home page to
Twitter, Facebook and Zynga (social gaming), so that users can file updates to
any of those sites without having to log on.
Go-to site for connecting across networks?
"We want to be the first choice to be home base for connecting across
networks," Irving said.
Yahoo Groups, revamped recently and now live-although a few features are still
not quite ready for prime time-granularizes the Facebook idea. It enables users
to create local and/or special-interest groups of friends who can share
updates, photos, videos, event listings, polls and several other features.
"On Facebook, if you have hundreds of friends, you have to be careful
about posting something that might be offensive or just not relevant to
somebody," Greg Rosenberg, Yahoo's director of user experience, told
eWEEK. "With Yahoo Groups, you can start up a neighborhood page with a
smaller group, for example, that would be of interest only to those neighbors
living in the neighborhood.
"There are already millions of people (115 million in 10 million Yahoo
Groups) using this, and it's ramping up."
Irving said Yahoo will keep
investing in applications for mobile devices like the iPad and the upcoming
Android-powered tablets. The Yahoo tablet home page will include e-mail, news,
an alarm clock, links to Twitter and Facebook, and a weather forecast page.
Yahoo has signed contracts with about 100 carriers and handset makers globally
to preinstall Yahoo applications on mobile devices, said Irv Henderson, Yahoo
director of mobile applications.
Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
