With all the attention focused on Facebook and Google, it's sometimes easy to forget how many people visit Yahoo on a typical day. The site has over 700 million users and gets a massive amount of page views each day. As the company struggles to figure out what its future focus should be, one thing they've prioritized highly is content.
Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.
Yahoo named PayPal president Scott Thompson its new CEO today. Scott who? Exactly. I'd never heard of him either. But with a technical background - and a need to prove himself, and no crazy Silicon Valley persona to stroke - he might actually be the right guy for the job.
Yahoo, like all media companies, must learn to become a better software and technology company, or it is toast. You can have as many pageviews and ad sales folks as you want, but if you can't build great Web products - which demands great software, as well as great content - you're not going to grow.
Yahoo! Inc. ended months of speculation and named Scott Thompson, president of eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, its new Chief Executive.
Thompson, who officially starts on Monday, replaces Tim Morse, Yahoo's chief financial officer, who had been interim chief executive since September. Carol Batz was fired in September after two-and-a-half years on the job after failing to raise revenue or gain ground on Facebook, Google and other rivals.
Yahoo is getting super-serious about the role tablets will play in its future content strategy. On Tuesday, they launched IntoNow, an impressive social TV app for the iPad that marries the check-in functionality of GetGlue with the real-time content identification of Shazam. The next day, the company pushed out LiveStand, another iPad app, this one in the tradition of personalized news reading apps like Flipboard, Zite and AOL's Editions.
The app, which comes in advance of Google's own rumored offering, is pretty well-designed. It has less content sources than many existing players, but what it does have is formatted very nicely.
If Flipboard thought it had enough competition in the social news-reading tablet app space, it's got a thing or two coming. Well, one from Google and one from Yahoo, reportedly. The two Web giants are working on their own such applications, the first of which may drop next week.
Livestand is Yahoo's take on the personalized reading app for tablets, which ousted CEO Carol Bartz announced earlier this year. Sources tell AllThingsD that the app is expected to be released next week. It was originally slated to be launched on iOS and Android during the first half of 2011.
I'm sure you haven't heard the news, but Yahoo's celebrated cursing CEO, Carol Bartz, was fired via telephone yesterday. Thankfully she wasn't dumped via text message, but all the same, discussion abounds as to whether this is just another sign that Yahoo's time is nearing an end or if this is a step in the right direction for Yahoo. We decided to put the question to you. Does Yahoo have a chance at survival?
Disclosure, I worked at Yahoo from 2007-2010 as the Community Manager for both the Yahoo Developer Network and MyBlogLog.
You answered and we culled your responses from the original post on ReadWriteWeb, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
Carol Bartz, who replaced Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang as the company's CEO in January 2009, has been let go by the company, according to a report by AllThingsD.
Bartz said she was "fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board" in an email sent to employees today. Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse will act as interim CEO until a longer term replacement can be found.
Today, Yahoo introduced two new search tools, one a new online search engine for finding new mobile applications, and the other a mobile app called AppSpot (iPhone, Android), which does the same. According to a Yahoo blog post, the goal of these new services is to help you better sort through the some 425,000 mobile applications on the iTunes App Store and the 200,000 apps on Google's Android Market so you can find the app you need.
But will Yahoo's efforts prove better than any of the existing services that already do the same?
After Chinese Internet giant Alibaba sold off its e-pay division to a newly created company headed by Alibaba's CEO, its American partner Yahoo threw a fit. It accused Alibaba of selling the division without informing them. After the initial outburst, the two companies announced they would find a solution without splitting the sheets.
Meanwhile, the new company, called Alipay, announced it has received a license from the Chinese government to operate as an electronic payments company, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Six months after announcing a redesign, the newest version of Yahoo Mail is ready to come out of beta today, promising more social integration, faster load times, better spam filtering, cross-device operability and better search. Yahoo announced the beta version in October 2010 and it is the first major update to the platform in about five years.
The Associated Press reports that Yahoo Mail has 277 million users, down 1% from the same time last year. Hotmail is the global leader with 327 million users while Gmail has grown 24% (43 million users) over the last year to 220 million. Yahoo's announcement coincides with last week's iOS update to Yahoo Messenger as the company looks to reassert itself as an innovator and communications leader.
