Business 2.0 editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld has written a long article entitled “The Flickrization of Yahoo.” The thrust of the piece is that Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr has “helped ignite a larger strategy” in which “Yahoo is starting to see how user-generated content, or “social media,” is a key weapon in its war against Google.”
It’s a strategy that comes right from the top. Social media “is going to be a gigantic piece of what we do,” says Yahoo CEO Terry Semel…”Yahoo has done the best job of the large guys of getting the concept,” says tech guru Esther Dyson, who was an early investor in Flickr.
Semel may get it, but if you want to see this revolution in action, you have to talk to the young guns he’s been hiring. Many of the champions of social media inside Yahoo — including Flickr’s [Stewart] Butterfield and [Caterina] Fake, senior technologist Bradley Horowitz, and the head of Yahoo’s developer network, Toni Schneider — are former startup founders recently acquired or hired. These entrepreneurs are sprinkling their social-media DNA all over the company, in a process some insiders are calling the “Flickrization” of Yahoo.
The Flickrizers’ most ambitious goal is to turn Web searching itself into a social event — the idea being that you can find what you’re looking for faster if you first see pages saved and tagged by people you know and trust. Done well, it could play as the triumph of the humans over Google’s cold mechanical approach.
If social search pans out, it could give Yahoo a much-needed edge over Google…”It is not who has the bigger index,” Horowitz says, taking a swipe at his rival. “We hear a lot about efforts to index all the artifacts of human knowledge, but the actual bulk of human knowledge lives in people’s heads.”
But the jury is still out on Yahoo’s plan to create “better search through people”, says Schonfeld:
In practice, however, tagging search results and bookmarks may still be too geeky an activity for Yahoo’s average Joe. Thus far, [Yahoo’s] My Web has seen tepid growth in the number of pages saved (about 300,000) and tags applied (fewer than 90,000). That might not seem bad for a product still in beta, but My Web is seeing little month-to-month growth. (Del.icio.us, by contrast, has 10 million saved pages and half a million tags.)
Social search requires people to change their habits, and My Web works well only if you and a bunch of your friends use Yahoo…Perhaps the largest pothole in Yahoo’s road to social media, however, is its business model. Users are encouraged to stay within the Yahoo network of pages as much as possible so they can be served more ads and sold more services…But the tricky thing about the culture of participation is that users want to choose how they participate. For example, many bloggers are setting up feeds that put Flickr photos directly on their blogs, meaning that Yahoo doesn’t get any pageviews — or ad revenues — from them. “I still think Yahoo has a heritage to overcome,” says tech book publisher and pundit Tim O’Reilly, referring to the decade-old habit of directing traffic to its site.
Schneider, the vice president in charge of Yahoo’s developer network, is trying to change that…[H]e’s encouraging programmers to create applications based on Yahoo content that will not necessarily be hosted on Yahoo. He’s doing this by opening up the company’s APIs, or application programming interfaces…And he has high hopes for a new business model based on the Yahoo Publisher Network, launched in beta last summer. YPN, as it’s known, serves up ads to small websites and blogs and pays them every time someone clicks on an ad, in much the same way Google’s AdSense does. The difference is that YPN lets websites tag themselves, Flickr-style, so as to get more relevant ads in return.
Mitch Shapiro at 1:47 PM|Comments(0)
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