Some posts ago, I mentioned that I’d be doing a bit of research into what Yahoo!’s been up to while Google’s been stealing all the limelight and headlines. Well, for starters, Business 2.0 has an good article titled “The Flickrization of Yahoo!”
The article talks about how Flickr has kick-started Yahoo!’s re-structuring from the stagnant, generation One portal that it was, into a more community-driven, content-oriented environment. Like Google, it appears to have tuned in to the power of the community’s opinions to build a better Web. Flickr itself, for instance, has changed the face or digital photography, creating a 1.5 million strong community, with 14000 photos being uploaded every hour, being tagged and searched, being linked to blogs and so on. What Yahoo! wants to do, is to Flickr-ize the whole web. To do with all the content on the web that Flickr did with digital photographs.
This is in stark contrast to Google’s approach, which is to use more and more sophisticated algorithms to mine the web for information. To this end, significant acquisitions by Yahoo include upcoming.org (an online calendar system, again created totally by the online society), Konfabulator (desktop widgets), which Yahoo! hopes will get users to “slice and dice Yahoo content any way they want”.
Worth a read. Additionally, I’m exploring My Yahoo! (my.yahoo.com), and it looks promising. Something like Google’s personalised homepage (google.com/ig), and at first glance I’m tempted to say that Yahoo!’s is better. But only at first glance. More about this, coming up!