A directory of OpenSocial Apps launched today and the reality is even further from that goal than we expected. Out of 12,456 apps listed, only 83 are running on two or more "containers." That's 0.7% or one out of every 1500. Update: See this reply below from Google's Kevin Marks. Marks says that cross-network presence was counted manually and is actually larger than it appears in the directory.

OpenSocial was intended to help everyone else keep up with the huge success of the Facebook platform. If there's one clear market leader, everyone else has a common interest in creating a standard that will help scale the market opportunity on their platforms vs. what Facebook can offer. It hasn't worked out that way, though.

Outside observers hoped that OpenSocial would allow for user data to be transmitted from one site to another. People thought this was the coming of Data Portability, though OpenSocial advocates quickly said that wasn't the intent. It was just for apps to port, not user data. There is a lot of innovation going on in OpenSocial - it's a shame the platform isn't better appreciated.

Below: I discuss OpenSocial in March of last year on G4TV, forced to break the host's heart about data portability!

Why hasn't cross-network development happened though? There are a few theories. The most common is that though there is a common bed of code across all the different social network containers, each of them is also tweaked just enough that it's not that easy to "write once." When that became apparent, OpenSocial advocates started saying that the standard still made it a lot easier to develop for multiple networks. So if not "write once, deploy everywhere" then perhaps it was "write once and then take a lot less time to write for elsewhere than you'd have to otherwise."

Clearly developers haven't taken advantage of that opportunity.

Google's Kevin Marks, one of the leading public faces for OpenSocial, told us today that there are serious cultural differences between the networks and that this could help explain why there hasn't been more cross pollination. One look through the directory makes it clear though that while the countless "hot bikini girl" apps may not translate from MySpace to LinkedIn well, all the other networks have their own isolated versions of many of the same insipid apps.

The most viable explanation could be that Facebook is in fact the only game in town for the most sophisticated developers. That's a real shame, because it's never good for innovation for there to be only one game in town.

The key addition is 'ad quality', which Google has been doing for years with AdWords. So Panama was always going to be a game of catch up for Yahoo. With that in mind, and nearly 6 months after Panama's launch, how is it performing?

I asked Yahoo for some data and metrics on how Panama is performing - has it increased ad sales, is the 'ad quality' improving? Gaude Lydia Paez, Director of Corporate Communications, responded that they can't provide specific metrics around performance, given that it's tied to their financials. However she did tell me that "the global rollout of Panama is progressing extremely well, and we are seeing strong performance in our US O&O search operations."

While no metrics were given, Paez told me that in Japan they recently launched the new ranking model "and feedback from advertisers has been positive - clickthrough rates are up and the prices our clients pay for leads are down."

Since the launch in the U.S., Yahoo has also "introduced several enhancements to the model that have focused on filtering poor ads and surfacing higher quality ads to the user." Paez said that Yahoo has "introduced quality-based pricing, which allows us to charge advertisers less for a portion of the traffic they receive, depending on the overall quality of the source."

External Reports

While Yahoo itself is remaining relatively tight-lipped about Panama results, others have reported mixed results. Search Engine Roundtable wrote at the end of April that four different SEMs in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread noticed a drop in volume from Yahoo! Search Marketing since the Panama upgrade. One said that although "the interface is much better and the account maitenance is somewhat easier", in terms of performance "we are down quite a bit from where we were pre-Panama. ROI is similar, but volume is way down." Another SEM reported "an extreme decrease in volume."

On 20 June, John Battelle published a report from Reprise, a leading SEO/SEM firm that works with Battelle's company FM Publishing (R/WW is an FM Publishing client). Reprise concluded that on performance, Yahoo's CPCs went down and click through rates went up. It stated:

"While campaign conversion rates were improved on both Google and MSN, Yahoo's conversion dropped off 5%. In other words, while perceived ad relevance may have improved, the truly important metric in the campaign suffered somewhat. "

Source: Reprise

The whole report is available as a PDF on John Battelle's site, but to sum it up: the technology of Panama is promising, but it is not yet delivering on the promise. In Reprise's words:

"While the launch of Project Panama represents a significant step forward for the Yahoo Search Marketing platform, it does not yet address all of the requirements of the market. Though the system makes strides towards establishing industry standard campaign structure, terminology and API access, it often finds itself under-delivering on the actual execution of these new features."

However Reprise notes that Panama is "brand new" and "needs time to find its footing and refine its offering."

Finally, a browse through Search Engine Land's recent report on the online advertising industry shows that not much has changed in the past six months. SEL noted that "Google is by far the dominant engine, and that's been the case all year, despite Yahoo's Panama launch and Microsoft's increased focus on AdCenter."

Conclusion

I was hoping for a more conclusive 6-month report on Panama, but really the jury is still out. Yahoo itself is (unsurprisingly) reporting positive changes. Meanwhile the response from the market has been mixed, but cautiously optimistic. Most reports so far have noted Panama's promise, but that it is not yet delivering better results. The upshot is that after six months, Google is still the dominant player in online advertising and there is little sign of that changing any time soon.

If you are using Panama, what have your experiences been like so far?

With this post, we close our file on 100 Days For Yahoo. Let us know whether you like the idea of Read/WriteWeb Files - i.e. focusing on a specific topic over a week.

Yesterday I listed 10 top Web properties that Yahoo owns. But the real question is: how to tie all of Yahoo's properties together and utilize them better? Josh Catone wrote that the solution is to make My Yahoo into an open platform, a la Facebook or iGoogle. Josh explained what can be done to create a more useful and meaningful Yahoo! for users, one that can keep people on the site and drive them to use their search engine. His theory:

Yahoo! needs to realize that the web platform is getting more and more important. Google already has, and is building a platform around their start page, iGoogle, by encouraging developers to build "gadgets" specifically for it. For Yahoo!, a platform can unify their services -- which right now are scattered -- and add utility to their page that will keep users there long enough to conduct searches. Yahoo! controls some of the hottest and most useful properties on the web, but has not figured out how to tie them together. They've started to bring some of their acquisitions under the single Yahoo! sign-on umbrella, but that still doesn't bring my del.icio.us links, my Flickr photos and my fantasy sports team management to one central location.

The good news for Yahoo! is that they already have a property just waiting to be turned into a full fledged platform: My Yahoo!

1. An Open API - why have a team of people adding only "official" modules to My Yahoo, when Yahoo could have thousands of developers doing the work for them for free?

2. Richer Applications - For My Yahoo! to be taken seriously as a platform and compete with Facebook and iGoogle, they'll need to support richer applications. That means applications that can be interacted with on the page.

3. Make the Platform Social - My Yahoo! already has 50 million users (by December 2006 numbers) -- certainly a lot more than Facebook. So it makes sense to build in a social network, rather than purchase one from the outside an go through the headache of figuring out how to get it integrated.

Yahoo Better Positioned Than Google

As Josh noted, "Yahoo! is actually in a better position to create a winning platform than Google is right now. Their start page is already established and has an enormous user base, they have a rich developer culture built around their other APIs and they can seed their platform with some of the best content on the web."

Josh's post is an excellent kick in the pants for Yahoo. I've just presented the Cliff's Notes version here, but read the whole post. Also check the comments, there are some insightful ones.

So will Jerry Yang take Josh's advice and make My Yahoo an open platform? The answer to that may effect the way you vote in this week's poll ;-)

1. Yahoo News is the number 1 Internet news site, according to comScore. It is a blend of automated and editorial, and also offers a number of personalization options. As Josh Catone explained in a recent R/WW post about news aggregation, Yahoo! takes news from the wires -- the Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, and PA SportsTicker, among others -- and aggregates them into a single stream. Editors keep duplicates to a minimum and decide which stories are the most important to be listed as top headlines. This mix of technology and editors creates a high quality news stream, albeit lacking the immediacy of blogs.

2. Answers allows users to search for things that don't yet have an answer. This is a key strategic product for Yahoo, because using 'people power' is one way Yahoo can take on Google in search. Social search is the catchphrase and it was something I discussed withYahoo's Bradley Horowitz and Caterina Fake a year ago at the Supernova conference. They told me how Yahoo Search is evolving into a more social construct. At that stage there were approximately 10 Million Y! Answers in the database, although I'm sure it's much more than that now.

And if you think Answers will never enable Yahoo Search to compete with Google, check out our recent story about how South Korean search company Naver.com is crushing Google in the South Korea market, largely due to Naver's "Knowledge iN" real-time question-and-answer platform - which gets an average of 44,000 questions a day. Long way to go before Yahoo gets that kind of uptake with Answers, but still it remains a key product for Yahoo.

See also R/WW's round-up of Q&A sites.

3. Flickr has been the web 2.0 poster child of photo sharing sites ever since it was released. When it was acquired in March 2005 by Yahoo, it continued to make incremental upgrades. Indeed at the 2007 Webby Awards (the Web's Oscars), Flickr picked up 3 awards (5 including two Peoples Choice ones), for Best Practices, Best Visual Design - Function, and Community.

Despite Flickr's impressive design and innovation, it has been somewhat overshadowed by Photobucket in terms of user numbers and traffic - thanks mainly to Photobucket piggy-backing off MySpace's success. However, as the below graph from Compete shows, Flickr has started to make big gains - and it's now almost caught up to Photobucket.

4. Pipes - Yahoo released an RSS Remixing service called Pipes in February 2007. At launch it was described as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator". Basically it's a hosted service that enables you to create remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment.

R/WW Author Alex Iskold was very impressed with Pipes, saying that it's the first GUI builder for the biggest database in the world - the Web iself. Alex said that when compared to Visual Basic and Power Builder, Yahoo! Pipes comes out as more inventive and no less rigorous that its predecessors. It empowers developers to remix the building blocks of the web in a whole new way. And it does it with remarkable simplicity.

5. Yahoo Mail - in most stats Yahoo Mail is the number 1 web mail product. However when the new Ajax version of Yahoo! Mail was released as a beta in September last year, it was certainly late to market. Gmail had been wowing geeks since April 2004, so it was a long wait until Yahoo! Mail caught the Ajax bug too. Which was odd, because it was based on an Ajax pioneer which Yahoo acquired in July 2004 - called Oddpost. But as Yahoo's Ethan Diamond explained to me back in September, when you roll out Ajax to 250M or so mainstream users, you need to make sure everything scales.

Yahoo Mail has the functionality of a desktop email client (such as Outlook). Other features include an integrated calendar timeline (including mashups with Yahoo Maps), drag and drop e-mail organization, message preview, tabs for messages, plus an integrated RSS reader. Also an API was released in March 2007. While it's not my favorite web mail service (see R/WW's Web Email Market Overview to find out what is!), Yahoo's option is great for those who like the desktop email paradigm.

6. Messenger (with Avatars). Yahoo's Instant Messenging product is one of the market leaders, but more importantly it is a lot of fun to use thanks to its avatars. It also has voice and many plug-ins.

Many people use multiple IM clients (and use meta IM services like Meebo and Trillian to manage that). And IM innovation has been strong in the past few years - common features these days include interoperability, flexible identities, rich media chat, in-browser chat, location-based chat, and contextual chat. So whatever IM client you use, there is a lot you can do with them on the Web.

7. Yahoo Music is a colorful and feature-rich online music service. Just today they released playlists, a new samples player, and web subscription playback. Yahoo acquired Webjay, an innovative playlisting startup, back in January 2006. So it's great to see playlisting make an appearance now in Yahoo Music. The new playlist functionality was described by Lucas Gonze (founder of Webjay) as "a full-featured module which includes the ability to play tracks and to comment on playlists. You can browse playlists by creator and you can browse playlists which a person has commented on, so there is a content-focused social network."

8. del.icio.us - As Alex Iskold wrote in the R/WW Social Bookmarking Faceoff in September, it could be argued that the current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked - triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today's rich and social web ecosystem.

Yahoo acquired del.icio.us in December 2005 and, like Flickr, it has iterated in small steps since then. There was initially talk that del.icio.us would integrate with Yahoo's other bookmarking service, My Web 2.0. But that never happened. In the end, del.icio.us has stayed pretty much independent - which is exactly how its many fans like it.

9. Yahoo Mobile - Yahoo OneSearch launched in January this year and then became the default mobile Yahoo homepage in March. This made it a purely search-centric homepage for mobile phones, whereas the old site had both search and a kind of mini-portal. There is a lot of added functionality in oneSearch; it tries to provide context when searching for something on your mobile phone, recognizing that on a phone you need different types of info than on a PC.

According to the December 2006 stats from M:Metrics, Yahoo! Search is currently the #2 search service on mobile phones for the US market - behind Google. It is obviously a growth market and Yahoo is bringing a lot of web functionality to its mobile property.

10. My Yahoo - last, but certainly not least, is My Yahoo. In many ways a precursor to the current crop of 'personalized start pages', My Yahoo is now taking on many of their attributes. As we noted in our March 2007 coverage of My Yahoo!'s Web 2.0 Makeover, My Yahoo! has been the company's personalized offering to its consumers since 1996. It is seen as the company's "narrowcast" option for users, while the yahoo.com frontpage is seen as the broadcast model. However over time, the two homepages will converge. Indeed the beta My Yahoo has some of the new features Yahoo introduced last year with its Ajax makeover of yahoo.com. And the look and feel is very similar between the two.

Up until the re-design in March, My Yahoo was a relatively static personalized homepage - mostly devoid of the widgets and gadgets that populate the likes of Netvibes and Live.com. However that is beginning to change, albeit very slowly compared to its startup competition.

Bonus

Yahoo Shopping just missed the Top 10, but nevertheless is has a lot of potential. Yahoo has just started to scratch the surface, with experiments like Brand Universe and Yahoo Shoposphere. The latter has a concept called 'me-commerce' and uses "Pick Lists" to let users share their stuff on the Shoposphere and Yahoo! Shopping - using email and RSS feeds. Yahoo Shopping also has an API, which is being used by companies like ShoppingPath.com, a shopping comparison service.

But there's so much more Yahoo can do with Y! Shopping - they could look to RSS and widget shopping startups to see what is happening in this domain [disclosure: I am an advisor at one such startup].

Conclusion

There were some obvious Yahoo properties that we haven't listed - for instance there was no room for Upcoming, Y! Games, Y! Finance or Y! Personals. All of those (and many more) are great services.

What do you think of this list - does it capture the best Yahoo products? What other Yahoo properties do you use, or what do you think needs improvement before you'd consider using it?

This week we've opened up a file on a recent statement from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. It was during Yang's debut earnings conference call on Tuesday 17 July, in which he said that "the next 100 days or so" will be spent mapping out Yahoo’s strategic plan. Here is Yang's full '100 days' statement:

"Looking ahead, we want to dramatically improve our performance and capture the major growth opportunities we see ahead for the Internet. I intend to spend the next 100 days or so focused on mapping out a strategic plan for the long-term success, working with our teams to put the right organization and the right people in place, and making any necessary changes.

We are well on our way with a top to bottom review of our business in order to effectively address the company's challenges and capitalize on our many great opportunities."

While there is a fair amount of generic executive talk in there ("working with our teams to put the right organization and the right people in place"), the '100 days' bit tells us that Yahoo is serious about getting its house in order. Also Yang's comment about "making any necessary changes".

Yahoo Needs to Change

The fact of the matter is: Yahoo needs to change, because otherwise it risks being left behind.

Yahoo is no longer the number 1 property on the Web, at least according to this month's comScore Top 10 Worldwide Online Properties report. That puts Yahoo at number 3, behind Google (#1) and Microsoft (#2). Yahoo is still ahead of its new media competitors - Time Warner is #4 and Fox Interactive #7.

In important areas, Yahoo is struggling. Its search initiative Panama isn't making inroads into Google's AdWords and Adsense. In social networking, Fox's MySpace and now Facebook are leaving Yahoo in their dust. And in key products Yahoo is being left behind by Google especially, and in danger of being overtaken by new media companies. For example in online video, Yahoo is a distant second behind Google - and only just ahead of Fox.

Of course it's not all gloomy for Yahoo. Further into the July earnings call, Yang refers to Yahoo being "a deep and active marketplace", noting that "it's an ecosystem that involves several hundred million participants every single day; consumers, advertisers, publishers and developers." And they could well argue they are still the number 1 portal on the Web, due to its largely consolidated properties - whereas Google and Microsoft are all over the shop with their different properties (e.g. YouTube is a Google property, but is largely self-sufficient and not integrated into Google's portal offerings).

Cut! No, Action!

Looking at the big picture, it's fair to say that Yahoo's attempt to become a 'big media' company over the past few years - in the mold of a CBS or Hollywood studio - has largely failed. That saw previous CEO Terry Semel exiting stage left this year, and now it's 100 days and counting under JerryYang's directorship. It's kind of like the star director being sacked from a blockbuster movie, and now there's only 100 days left to wrap filming on what everyone expects to be next summer's biggest release. Except it was actually due out a couple of summers ago and now the script needs a major re-write! A lot of pressure for the new director.

"Um Tom, unfortunately I'm going to have to fire your ass..." (pic by Maximum Mitch)

In any case by the middle of October, we should expect to see significant changes in Yahoo's product portfolio and probably a new overall strategy (or at least a better defined one).

What can Yahoo do to get back in the game? In Jerry Yang's 100 days, what will be on his hit list and what Yahoo properties can he promote or enhance more? Stay tuned to Read/WriteWeb this week to find out. In the meantime, please participate in our special poll: