Comments for Yahoo Ramping Up Content Networks - But Scaling Back on RSS?

Yahoo Ramping Up Content Networks - But Scaling Back on RSS?

2006-11-30T23:01:04Z

This week Yahoo has released some new initiatives and polished up the design of existing content properties. Here is R/WW's summary of the action, along with some commentary...

Yahoo TV re-design - and is Yahoo scaling back RSS?

Yahoo TV has had a re-design, giving it a liberal sprinkling of Ajax and social Web features. I was interested to read Steve Rubel's take on this and other recent Yahoo re-designs, in which he claims that Yahoo is "backing away from RSS". He wrote:

"In the past few weeks Yahoo has rolled out three major new web sites - Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV. They're great sites, but none of them has feeds. There's a reason why - eyeballs."

Of course, those three sites that Steve mentions are all very mainstream - and RSS is still not anywhere near mass uptake. But Steve is right that Yahoo has been a leader over the past couple of years in efforts to mainstream RSS, so it is a little disappointing they aren't continuing to push it in the likes of Y! TV.

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RSS is already in MyYahoo, the new homepage released earlier this year, and in the Yahoo Mail Beta. So I would've thought there are plenty of cross-linking and promotional 'eyeball' opportunities - e.g. a user subscribes to their Y! TV feeds in MyYahoo. I'll try and follow up with some folks in Yahoo to find out more about their current strategy with RSS - perhaps they have found that RSS is getting very low uptake from the more mainstream sites and so they don't consider it worthwhile including at this point.

Brand Universe

In other news, Variety is reporting that Yahoo has a "brand universe" plan:

"[Yahoo] has identified more than 100 properties that are the most popular, or fastest-growing, with its users and is building what it calls a "brand universe" Web site around each one. Set to launch throughout 2007, they will bring content from throughout Yahoo!'s network into one destination for fans."

It's not explained all that well in the Variety article, but basically this will be like a custom Yahoo portal for external brands. An early example is a Yahoo-branded site for Nintendo's Wii, which includes "articles from Yahoo! Games, fan pictures from photo site Flickr, purchase options from Yahoo! Shopping, user questions and responses from Yahoo! Answers and links to outside articles from bookmarking site Del.icio.us."

What's particularly interesting about this is that Yahoo won't necessarily be working with the brands to get the content - i.e. it won't necessarily be exclusive or licensed content. Traditionally Yahoo has partnered with media sites, but (perhaps taking a bit of a lead from popular Web 2.0 services like YouTube) it is now actively and freely utilizing other peoples content. Probably without the legal issues YouTube has though!

Mixd

Finally a product called Mixd came to public attention this week. It is is a group mobile messaging tool for the youth market and is still in the experimental stages. However Techcrunch managed to get a tip off and so the site has now been well publicized. Mixd seems like an interesting site for its target market, but the current experimental nature of Mixd means there isn't too much to read into it from a high level perspective.

What do all of these things have in common?

All these announcements from Yahoo will remind people of the recent internal memo by Yahoo senior VP Brad Garlinghouse - dubbed the 'Peanut Butter Manifesto' - in which he claimed that Yahoo as a company is unfocused and has too many product lines that cross over. But there is a common thread here, which is that Yahoo is continuing to pump out Web content networks (albeit with a slight question mark over RSS in some properties now).

Yahoo is much more a content company than Microsoft or Google, so all of the above news serves to reinforce that and remind us that Yahoo is keeping busy building up its media network. Nothing sensational, but there are interesting developments here in terms of RSS and Yahoo using non-licensed content.

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2006-11-30

2006-11-30T23:18:07Z

I like the new Y! services, they're all very usable, fast and looking very well. Mixd proves that what was told in this internal memo is actually a well thought strategy of Yahoo! and not mistakenly made chaos. Mixd was not acquired, internally developed but still being marketed as a different product - which is good I think as people are exhausted to see Y! brand everywhere.

Comment from Denver Wang on 2006-11-30

2006-12-01T05:53:25Z

I agree with the #1, New Y! is great, espeically the mail serivces just like I am using my outlook. But I have to say, what I thought is yahoo is getting old, lost it's impassioned energy. In fact I really enjoy the suprise the old yahoo gave me in the old time.

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2006-11-30

2006-12-01T06:06:46Z

@Denver, but I should admit I'm quite happy with new Y! Mail being still in beta status. OK it looks great, RSS integration is great great great (bad bad bad for startpages, but no digress...) and its perfomance despite all the Javascript burden is amazing... but it's still not very usable. When you browse through messages, naturally it takes some time loading and lags become irresistible when you try to go down a few messages. I reported this to Yahoo too, I hope they'll fix it before the official release.

As for the energy... Actually this pushes me to think about the old Yahoo - MSN competition. MSN always had better looking offerings but Yahoo surprisingly won with their mediocre but usable designs. And now Google is like the old Yahoo, and Yahoo like the old MSN. Y! try to catch Google with better looking products but I'm not sure if it can work. I wonder though how Microsoft will be positioned in this new battle :)

Comment from Pramit on 2006-11-30

2006-12-01T06:33:31Z

RSS in email is a good idea as well.

Comment from Soyapi on 2006-11-30

2006-12-01T07:42:25Z

I think Yahoo's Lack of Focus is a feature not a bug although it makes them less cool than Google.

While Google is leading us in revolutionary directions (e.g. text ads), Yahoo moves with the masses (source high traffic) and offers both text and graphical ads. They position themselves to rip the benefits of whichever trend becomes popular; whether its web2.0 del.icio.us or classic Yahoo Bookmarks.

I've written a post about this at http://soyapi.blogspot.com/2006/11/yahoos-lack-of-focus-bug-or-feature.html

Comment from Sull on 2006-12-01

2006-12-01T15:09:29Z

though its always good to keep an eye on rss usage, especially by the big dogs like yahoo.... but i tend to smirk when i read peoples surprising reaction to MSM projects not using rss.
think about it, is it really that shocking? even youtube doesnt blatently promote their rss feeds. as useful as rss is and will continue to be, its not the perfect fit just yet for most MSM endeavors... unless its strictly used for alerts which bring users to the web pages or embedded media players where playback is trackable etc.

regarding yahoo's lack of focus.... it is likely damaging to some extent but the longer-term bigger picture of the yahoo path is more sound and logical due to this spreading of interests across the new media landscape. rapid failure results in valuable knowledge and can lead to key successes... or something like that ;) i think most BIG companies are aware of this... at least they all seem to practice it.