I’ve been thinking of blogging about my employment with Yahoo! for a while, but never got around to it. Reading today, about yet another impending Yahoo! reorg, I decided to write about what I felt like while I was there, what worked, what didn’t, and how Yahoo! can get out of the rut it finds itself in.

I was employed by Yahoo! from Oct. 2005 – Nov. 2006. It was my first job out of school, my first full-time job indeed. I had only done a couple of internships (in Singapore & Santa Fe, NM) before it.

It started out great. I got the offer an hour after I interviewed with Yahoo! (Burbank/Pasadena office), which was a welcome change since I was going back-and-forth with Google at that point. Google had flown me from Tucson, AZ (where I was finishing up grad school) 3 times to their Mountain View headquarters, and after having talked with 22 people (yes twenty-two, I kept a count!) on phone and in-person they still couldn’t make up their mind. But I digress…

I joined Yahoo! in the YPN team, which was going to be the adsense competitor. I was excited for multiple reasons

• Somewhere around that time I had started reading blogs, and was totally hooked onto the online “thing”. I was graduating with my thesis in AI/Multi-agent systems and was excited about applying what I had learned to a new Yahoo! product.
• I was going to live in LA, and get to live a fast-paced life
• I knew ad-serving had lots of computational challenges, from scalability to being able to process large data-sets, relevancy of ads, personalization etc. etc.

My team was great, and I made some very good friends. Then in my first week at Yahoo!, Panama happened! Panama was going to be an overhaul of the Yahoo! advertiser product and almost everyone at Yahoo! Burbank was going to be working on it. Except for my team, since we were publisher focused.

That was a bummer, since that meant our team was not going to get the attention/resources it needed. There were other bummers, like every team at Yahoo! “pushed back”. I didn’t know if it was territorial or not but people just didn’t want to take “risks”. There were lots of meeting, but usually nothing came out of them.

I also realized that the team I had joined was going to be managing the front-end interface which publishers were going to be logging into etc. I wasn’t going to be designing algorithms, writing pieces of ad-server code or facing any scalability challenges at all That all was being done by another team, which seemed to not like us at best, hate our team at worst.

There were other problems with Engineering @ Yahoo!, which I didn’t realize back then, since I didn’t know any better. There were virtually no spec/design meetings, no code reviews (not including paper code reviews once it had already been written!!), we were using CVS (seriously?) to manage our code. There were motivational issues too as I saw it. The VP (Engineering) to which my team reported to barely knew me. Now not that its a big problem, but in my 1 year there, he did not get the entire team in a room and talk to us, our problems, motivate us etc.

Now there were exceptions. A star employee Qi Lu. Even though he was a SVP, within a month of moving to Burbank, he called my entire team for a meeting, wanted to know each of us, was just an all round great manager. Most stars like these have left Yahoo! (Qi Lu is now with Microsoft – announcement). Most of the product managers I worked with were rockstars too, so it wasn’t the foots on the ground that was the problem, it was more the VP and above employees that have failed Yahoo! They had the talent, they had the resources, they just weren’t able to execute.

In short my advise to Yahoo! is:
+ Develop common engineering infrastructure so that every group does not re-invent the wheel in terms of server technologies, persistent storage/caching etc. Ala Google app engine.
+ Keep closing properties that suck, or merging them with pre-existing ones
+ Stop trying to beat Google at search. Come up with innovative advertising related products, that are not simply search. Maybe focus on more on product search, or travel etc.
+ Small teams, trim down and promote the good guys/gals!
+ Focus on the enterprise space also, its huge!
+ Hire senior execs who truly “get it” (case in point, Jeff Weiner who is now COO of LinkedIn) and care about the people who report to them, directly or indirectly.

This isn’t meant to be a rant, or anti-Yahoo! commentary. I think the company always had potential and I’d like it to do well and innovate (case in point YOS). Hoping for the very best, and wishing Carol Bartz Best of Luck!

This post could easily have been named “Targeted Blogging” or “Feature requests for Feedburner”

So I started thinking about a RSS/Atom feed that is intelligent. Meaning each of my blog’s feed subscribers can potentially be offered unique content. So let me present a few scenarios:

- Wouldn’t it be great to be able to write a blog entry about music, and have only people who had “music” as one of their interests, be the only ones who see it in their Google Reader/My Yahoo!/NetNewsWire ?
- What if I was organizing an event in San Francisco, and wanted to let only people who are in California know about it ?

Problems:
- Doing Geo Targeting for ads within feeds is easy, since they load within the browser as a separate request, hence the ad server can act with intelligence about time of day/location etc. Sadly the same is not true for my blog entries. I write them once.
- Scenario#2 above is a bit flawed, because what if my friend from NY is going to be in California during that time period, then he/she will not be able to attend, since my blog entry won’t show up in his/her feed!!

Solutions:
- When the user comes and clicks on my “Add to Yahoo/Google” button I ask them for some basic info, such as age/location/profession etc. They may chose to ignore it of course, but if they don’t they are giving me important information.
- A better solution is for feed burning platforms such as Feedburner to maintain a persistent profile of users who are subscribing to feeds. So my profile would read: “Sumit Chachra, Male, 26, San Francisco, CA ……..”. This information will *never* be shared with feed publishers, but they can use it to target content (much the same way Facebook ad targeting works)
- The problem with scenario#2 can be resolved using a few techniques. Assuming Google Calendar has a feature called “Location” where in I can feed in my coordinates for specific dates, and this information can be shared with Feedburner, then my feedburner profile is really “dynamic”! We’re headed down the path of intelligent agents here really, and its all starting to sound like a scifi (scary) movie at this point

All this implies that each subscriber to my feed has a unique feed url, which will spit unique content to each such subscriber, based on certain data points that the feed url platform knows about them, and using which the feed publisher can do targeted content delivery!

I wish this existed!

It was a long time coming! Yahoo! chose to use Flash (Flex?) to build the online version of messenger. Will I use it, probably on my personal laptop at home (one less piece of desktop software to install… phew!). Does it even come close to the Gtalk that comes integrated with Gmail (launched more than a year back)? Not for me, but I can imagine people who would want all the bells and whistles of their regular desktop messenger (fonts, text size, bold/italic etc.) to like the new Yahoo! Web Messenger. Some of my comments on this new products and ways to improve it:

History: So finally I can see my chat history. But why not give a search box right at the top instead of making me click on a link? Pretty basic interaction designer stuff I assume? Instead a web search box is provided at the top.

Cntrl-W / Cntrl-G / Cntrl-Tab: None of these nice shortcuts works. Cntrl-W should close my current chat tab, Cntrl-G should let me buzz my friends (my friends can buzz me, but my window doesn’t vibrate!) and Cntrl-Tab should let me move between chat tabs, just like I can on my Firefox (or at least Tab like the way it does in the Gmail/Gtalk)

Copying multiple lines: Doesn’t work. Only one line at a time. Thats pretty lame.

Banner ad on the right: Was it very essential to put that ugly banner ad on the right, specially when a new product like this launches? If I were the Product Manager on the web messenger team, I’d instead match (and rotate every 10 minutes or less) text ads related to my past/current chats. I’d bet this would increase CTR significantly. Irrespective its worth an experiment for sure. Simple bucket test to conduct.

Login popup: Why does a new popup window need to be opened to make my login? Its a very jarred user experience, different from every other Yahoo! property I’ve used before.

Have the battle lines been drawn? Is it time to take sides? Am referring to the recent announcement that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google will be joining Apple Computers board. As a keen follower of the companies and a avid user of their services, software and computers I find the move extremely interesting and exciting. So what are the areas they can cooperate on?

• I can imagine a world without the need for the $99 .mac service that Apple provides. I’ve heard the service is not great (I did use it through the 60 day trial and wasn’t impressed).
• Google and Apple could work out a better solution for the end customer where in Mac Mail, Calendar, Address-book etc. just work with the corresponding Google services, keeping all user data in sync.
• Why limit ourselves to mundane things only? How about being able to access (and play) all my iTunes music and video through Google Video (and Audio one day)? How about backing my entire mac and making it searchable online?
• Spotlight search on Mac’s could offer algorithmic web search results from Google.

Now there are areas where Google and Apple may not see eye to eye:

• Apple would like to keep iPhoto as the tool for managing photos, instead of Google’s Picasa (which someday may have a Mac version…for now it has a basic picasa web albums uploader).
• Apple would probably like to make sure that they retain their brand and mac doesn’t become synonymous with Google (far fetched …. but possible).

A quote from the very well written NY Times article:

“The old social networks in Silicon Valley run very deep,” noted AnnaLee Saxenian, a leading scholar of the industry and dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “And this reminds us that Silicon Valley has a common enemy to the north.”

Now we all know who the common enemy is! But the real question is what options does all this leave it and Yahoo! (the company I work for) with?

I increasingly find myself storing “interesting” links on del.icio.us. Most of these links simply do not belong on my browser bookmark bar. So what exactly is the difference ? What I have on my browser are things like my bank e-account, stock trading website etc. What is on my delicious account are things I am interested in and things I would like to take a look at sometime in the future.

Its a very subtle difference, but one that will prevent Google browser sync (which I find somewhat useful) from becoming delicious like. This means delicious will power social search, where as my browser bookmarks won’t (mind you, browser bookmarks can be very personal to people!).

Google notebook is cool, but I don’t find myself using it at all. For me bookmarks is more about just tagging and storing them, and less about writing notes on them and doing online “research”! The “note this” feature on the Google SERP is not so helpful either cause I want to visit the website before deciding if its worth noting.

On the face of it Yahoo’s new offering Y! Answers might seem “similar” to Google answers or other similar services that may exist out there, but its a refreshingly different offering. Anyone can ask any question. Unlike Google Answers though:

1. Anyone can answer any question, unlike a limited set of vetted “answerers”.
2. You don’t have to pay to get your questions answered.
3. You or the community decides the best answer after a certain period of time.

The nice (and evolving) scoring system that has been put in place makes it a very fun process too! Two common questions that people have asked me are:

1. Why not simply search online for your question?
2. What’s the incentive for people to spend time and answer questions?

The answer to the former is simple. Search engines are not good yet to answer questions like this (I had friends visiting me over Christmas!):

I got 3 good answers to my question in less than 10 minutes!

The answer to the latter is a combination of addiction, competition (increasing your score) and monetization. If you go to Y! answers and click on your name on the top next to your score then you are taken to a page that lists your score details, past asked/answered questions etc. At the bottom you will see this (Disclaimer: I work on the YPN team):

Its not clear yet how Y! plans to reward publishers. But advertising next to search results has already been put into place:

This brings me to my final point: “Why Amazon.com should care?”. The reason Amazon should care is:

• People will soon start asking questions as to why Amazon does not reward its customers who post comments / product reviews on its website. Its anyone’s guess that these reviews help Amazon in a big way. Why not say a Thank You by giving reviewers discounts or gift card $$ ??
• Product reviews are usually never comprehensive. Why not put a simple Q&A feature in place where people can ask simple product questions and get them answered. They could show the recently asked or answered questions on the home-page etc.

I decided to make full use of my domain name (chachra.us) and buy some hosting space to run this blog. I’m still in school so the postings will be a little slow. But hopefully that will change in the coming months!

I’ve also imported a half-dozen or so posts from the blog I used to miantain at Yahoo! 360.

Enjoy!