Yahoo rolls out social Web foundation
Yahoo is beginning the transition to its new socially-enabled platform, laying the foundation for a "universal profile" Thursday.
The new profile page will allow users to make limited changes to their profiles, such as status updates, adding connections (friends in the social graph) from their Yahoo address book, and listing interests. Users can change settings, control permissions and manage notifications across various Yahoo properties.
Yahoo 360 (Yahoo's 2005 attempt to create a social network ) member profiles will be migrated to the new system, but Yahoo 360 won't be going away yet, according to Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.
(Credit: Yahoo)"There is not a lot to demo in this release. It's a foundation release that will allow other things to happen and developers to do things," Stoneham told me. "We have to make sure it works before turning on connections to big traffic properties. The big bang theory doesn't work at this scale. It like Apple rolling out a new operating system release." In September, Yahoo gave developers access to its new social APIs and Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) for writing applications that run on Yahoo Web pages.
Stoneham expects Yahoo's social graph to "light up quickly" soon, however. Over the next few months, more Yahoo property activity feeds will show up in the profile page and additional aggregation points, such as the home page and Yahoo Mail, will aggregate feeds and allow connections. In Yahoo Mail, users will see messages from contacts, connection requests and activity updates from contacts. The Yahoo.com home page will offer a module that shows the activity updates of a user's connections.
In this screen from the January 2008 CES demo, Yahoo Mail shows messages from a user's most important connections as well as their status updates.
(Credit: Yahoo)In addition, within the next few months Yahoo is adding a new universal header on every page of the service to unify key navigation elements. Along with the usual links to the Yahoo home page, MyYahoo and Yahoo Mail, a new profile link will provide access to user profiles and contacts.
Over time, properties such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Flickr and Yahoo Buzz, will be socially enabled beyond activity feeds, Stoneham said. He gave an example of requesting a review from a user's connections while perusing a product page in Yahoo Shopping. When a review is posted it shows up in the user's activity feed. In addition, miniprofiles are available to get information quickly about the reviewer. If the reviewer isn't a personal connection, the profile won't have all the contact information.
During an interview in September, Venkat Panchapakesan, head of Yahoo's Audience Technology Group, listed the three top challenges Yahoo faces in bringing its social dimension to scale: making applications such as Yahoo Mail work well on desktop and mobile devices; data privacy; and converting all profiles to a single name space (the universal profile) and lighting up the social graph. One challenge partially down, and two to go.
Correction: Previously it was reported that Yahoo Buzz activity feeds would be surfaced at this time in the new profile pages. A Yahoo spokesperson said that the Buzz feed was not yet implemented.
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Dan Farber is editor in chief of CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan.
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The new profile loses all the information from your previous profile... and tries to make a half baked MySpace or Facebook page ....after the debacle of yahoo360 I would have thought Yahoo would have been a bit more careful.
And the new page doesn't not even seem to link to Yahoo Messenger properly!
If Yahoo wanted to drive away a huge market for their services ? users who want anonymity & privacy rather than "connection" ? they?ve managed to find the perfect way to do it. The Yahoo role-play community is particularly up in arms because Yahoo gave no notice of the change before wiping out all the information users had placed in their old profiles. It?s another self-inflicted wound and a completely unnecessary one, to boot. Too bad you seem to have little more idea what the existing Yahoo user base had found attractive about the old profile system than Yahoo does. Blind leading the blind?.
The old profiles could have done just as good of a job and were a lot more simplistic to edit. Not to mention for all of Yahoo!'s banter about enhancing "privacy", they force you to put up your full name on the profile, and if you want no one to see it, then you have to edit who your profile shows up to, effectively making it impossible for anyone outside the "connections" to see it, and thus defeating the purpose of the profile in the first place.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, people took advantage of the ability to create up to 5 alternate profiles under a single account for whatever reasons they wish. Now all alternate profiles are either blank with no way to edit them, or they just lead you back to the main ID the profile is under.
So in a nut-shell, Yahoo! has really screwed up big time with this thing, and the masses have expressed their strong disapproval. One can hope that Yahoo! will respond quickly to this and revert to the old profile system before they lose too many users/customers.
As a long-time user (since 1998) of Yahoo!Chat to stay in touch with the online role-playing community, I have seen a comedy of errors in these decisions. It was one thing to yank the user-generated chat rooms; the community is still divided on whether this was in fact a move intended to target pedophiles or just a knee-jerk response to a sponsor pulling an ad.
Either way, -nobody- appreciated it.
Then there was the decision to transfer the photo-hosting to Flickr. Since then, the profiles that roleplayers depend upon to identify and connect with one another were only marginally functional. Some pictures worked fine, others were resized. Some had to be linked, and many people went without.
-Nobody- appreciated that, either.
Then came the most hilarious travesty; the introduction of Captcha software, touted as "the anti-bot Turing test." A completely illegible password is given to you, in the expectations that only a human being could possibly make sense of it. After a few tries, you might it right, only to be told the room you want is full.
Full of WHAT?! .... you guessed it! It turns out that bots can get by it just fine!
In fact, in most chat rooms today, bots outnumber human beings by as much as four to one! Even in family-oriented rooms, such as religion, genealogy, and Nintendo, most conversation consists of bots squawking at each other about how ***** they are, how hot the other one is, and how they want to take off their tank tops.
In order for Yahoo to acknowledge this comedy of errors, the same thing that happened to the user rooms needs to happen here. A CNET writer needs to check out the chat environment, and ask the sponsors (being advertised in each chat room) what THEY think of Yahoo attracting their precious demographic to such a wretched den of corporate villainy.
"Many of you have expressed your concern with the newest version of profiles, and believe me, we?re reading and hearing your comments and are committed to helping you maximize your experience with the new profiles.
First off, we want to apologize straight away for not being more proactive in communicating in advance that we were making changes to our profiles. We should have let you know that change was coming."
I think they realise what a huge error they have made .... but it is way too late!
Meanwhile a similar thing is happening over at Flickr with Flickr desperately trying to hose down complaints about the new page layout impose don users yesterday.
Supporting this theory are several facts commonly agreed upon by these users (and not commented upon by Yahoo, even in denial).
1. Captcha is configured to be as difficult as possible for even human beings to use - passwords are hard to read and often incorrect. Repeated efforts to sign in are necessary, but the process is thwarted by the ambiguous "Error #999." If the room is full, you will not be informed of this until you have SUCCESSFULLY completed verification, which means you're often screwed even if you get it right!
2. Despite these difficulties, bots bypass Captcha verification with no effort at all. The rate at which a group of new bots will swarm into a room precludes the possibility of a human being logging them in manually.
Google and MSN also use Captcha, but their chat environments are curiously bot-free. Whether this is because of actual fraud on Yahoo's part or just their ordinary belligerence towards their customer base has yet to be proven.
3. Advertisers pay Yahoo a commission for the number of people who view their ads in the chat program. The more people who see these ads, the more money Yahoo makes (and a nice bonus for clicks, too).
4. This buggery on the part of Yahoo is expected to continue driving down the population of users within the chat environment. The remainder call what's left "Yahell" for a reason. This should mean less revenue, BUT....
5. ... the bot population has been increasing steadily. As a result, chat rooms remain full, and Yahoo continues to report this (only slightly misleading) fact to its sponsors. The sponsors, whose records show that the chat room did in fact have 50 people in it at the given time, pays Yahoo the full revenue.
6. Meanwhile, an investigative reporter discovers pedophiles doing their thing with little girls in the private rooms, and a sensationalistic news report exposes Yahoo's seedy underbelly. Rather than take control of the situation, Yahoo opts for the baffling decision to kill off the user rooms.
7. This, combined with the forced exodus to the public rooms (where the ads are) and the outsourcing of photo hosting to Flickr, suggests that to maximize their earnings, Yahoo is slashing expenses. In a well-coordinated strike, Yahoo suddenly axes the profiles and all of the information on it.
8. Without profiles, it is now impossible to positively distinguish bots in the chat room from human beings without messaging them directly. This is not an accident. If a consumer watchdog alerts the sponsor paying for that ad, Yahoo claims that there is no reliable way to identify "that person" as a bot and that "besides, Captcha would prevent bots from entering the chat room in the first place."