Say what you want about some of Yahoo’s business incompetencies (Buy Maven, then squash it? Pay programmers lots of money to work on projects, then shutter them when the rest of the market has tied you to the whipping post? Dumb!), but the Web services company sure knows how to market with humor.
If you’ve been following the Yahoo home page redesign details from last week, you need to see Yahoo programmers explain how they reprogrammed the home page, leveraging RSS feeds to essentially make it a live Web app platform for users.
In the video below, Yahoos explain how they separated metadata from markup and used machine-learned models, Hadoop, giant JSON structures, YUI 3.0, intelligent squid-caching mechanisms, YDBM, MDBM, the content optimization knowledge engine, adapter layers and the like to retool the page.
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Geek speak for what went into our new homepage @ Yahoo! Video
My personal favorite is: “We’ve overcome the latency issues associated with third-party data integration by employing intelligent squid-caching mechanisms.” This is translated in closed captions as “Now you can add the sites you love. (Even if they’re not on Yahoo).”
This is just as good as some of those IBM videos, particularly the one where IBMers are lying on the floor to “ideate” how to do things.
I wish Google would create some of these interesting videos. People would have a field day with commercials involving programmers, some of whom are celebrities in the high-tech world.
Google hasn’t ever really been able to show a sense of humor regarding its search or Web services.
Its videos introducing new products tend to be serious and matter-of-fact, and when humor is sprinkled in by the marketing team, it tends to fall flat or is downright cornballish.
What sort of entertaining instructional videos would you like to see Google conjure from products such as Google Voice, Chrome or Android?